My site is still only 7 months old but i am getting concerned that although growing at a good rate we are getting nearly all our traffic from the US. we are a UK site but over 90% of our traffic comes from the US anyone else had this problem?
Make sure you build UK links to your site. It would also help to have a UK host and a .uk domain, but it's probably too late to change that.
It's not uncommon. Two questions - If the domain is .com, can you get the .co.uk version as well? This could help with the search engines, and will definitely help if you do any offline promotion. Can you monetize the traffic that you get from the USA? Maybe you can create a US version of your product, or sell a related affiliate product, or just put up some pages with Adsense and/or Kontera that will be aimed at US readers? If you need more UK traffic consider offline promotions, or use Google Adwords with geographic targeting.
Do you have a .co.uk domian? Also, maybe yopu could have conetnt with slight UK bias in terms of keywords. That might help also.
What are you using to determine where the traffic comes from? Because some things aren't exactly accurate like awstats - at least not in my experience.
I think alot of UK sites get a good bit of US traffic. I have a .co.uk domain and most of the traffic comes from the US. I also get good traffic from the UK, but the larger share of it is from the US.
Thanks for the posts everyone. I can confirm we have a co.uk domain (we also own ALL the others .com .org .me .net etc but the main one is the uk. Site is hosted in US and stats are reported from SmarterStats Enterprise Edition 3.2.2480 I have thought about making use of the american traffic with some sort of affiliate prgram but i am looking at setting up and affiliate program as a merchant in the near future so me actually being the affiliate may cause a little conflict - i will have to look into this one a little further.
Why is this a bad thing? I guess it depends on your site content, but if it is targeted towards students I would say don't fret it too bad. Students I know are transient, many of my US friends are studying abroad in the UK as it is one of the few places americans can do so.
The main thing that you have to look for is to see whether your site is listed / indexed in the UK google search engine. If it is not then that is the time that you have to look at it and wonder why. If it is, then I wouldn't worry about it as most probably the majority of your traffic is coming from the google.com site where most of them are US anyway.
Check out in google webmaster tools whether traffic is at least ALSO coming from the UK for relevant keywords. As someone said: there are just way more people in the US versus the UK. As long as you do rank well in google.co.uk, also ranking well in the US isn't a big deal. This could be caused, in part, by having your host in the US.