International SEO
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back Rankers! If you remember from last week’s video we covered a project called ‘yvprojects’ and we did a site: search and had no results. Now the full site has been indexed, because Yvonne went and did exactly as I suggested and the result is that the site is finally indexed.
Looking at a keyword for Yarra Valley Projects still doesn’t see them on page one, but we also don’t have Places set up yet. Incidentally, that was a little oversight on my behalf in last week’s video, and something I should have mentioned. One of the first backlinks you should go and get is from Google Places, Google My Business.
Cast the Net
This week I want to talk about getting more international traffic, and how you go about doing that. The reason I’m covering the topic this week is that we received a question from ‘bookitlive.’ If you haven’t used ‘bookitlive’, it’s an awesome service and David is a North Melbourne man to boot! You should support him, even if you aren’t a North Melbourne fan, as it’s a great service and I’ve used it a number of times. It’s an online booking system for business, and we use it when we go to conferences and the like, so people can book in and make appointments to see me to chat about their sites. It’s easy to set up and use.
So David said he was getting sales from the U.S. and a few other countries but wanted to know how he could leverage that traffic. The first thing I would suggest, and David is a .net by the way, which makes him a top-level domain (TLD). I’d go into the Google Search Console and look for his international targeting.
The reason I want to see that is because with a TLD you can target it based on the country where your audience is. Now for David, because he’s an Australian business, he’s set it up for Australia. This makes it a little bit difficult to get traffic from the U.S. although he is achieving that. So that’s a good sign.
I’ll come back to the international setting in a second. Firstly, I’ll show you how you can target some phrases that you may already be ranking for. That’s what I’d do first. If you want to get quick traffic from another country, go and see which phrases you’re already ranking for in those countries. You can do this with the Google Search Console. You can see I’ve gone into Search Analytics so that I can see ‘Clicks,’ ‘Impressions,’ and ‘Position.’
If I remove ‘Position’ for now you can see that the country is United States. I’m only looking for ‘Clicks’ and ‘Impressions’ for bookitlive.net from the U.S. You can see that we’ve had 33,000 Impressions but only 247 Clicks. I see a huge opportunity there. When I check rankings for their phrases, their brand is number one, but ‘online booking system’ has 769 Impressions and it says we rank 9.6. We can check that.
Target Your Phrases
I’m on Google.com and using a VPN that has me in Los Angeles. If I go and look up ‘online booking system’, I can see that we are indeed around number ten. So we are already on the front page, but we’re saying the audience is in Australia. What I would do is look for phrases like this, and check out Google Trends. The homepage of the site could do with a little optimising as we have no h1 but we have two h2s. Once you’ve established which phrases you want to target in those countries, go back to your site, and work out what needs doing to it to get those phrases ranked higher. When I look in Australia to see where David ranks for that phrase, I need to turn my VPN off, he is at number three. That is great, but I see potential to go to number one for that phrase here. Because he is already number ten in the U.S., it is a delicate situation to turn off international targeting now that it’s been set to Australia for so long. I reckon I wouldn’t do that yet until he’s had a good go at ranking higher for ‘online booking system’ in the U.S. by doing on-page stuff first. Maybe try to get some local signals from the U.S. as well, especially if you have existing clients over there that may let you link to their sites to say they use your service. If you do a blog, maybe talk about some customers that are using your product locally and how they are doing so. Obviously, if you had an office in the U.S. you would get a Google My Business set up. If you don’t have the office in another country then you unfortunately can’t do that.
When to Make the Switch
I think with a little tweaking of the homepage we could probably see a rise to six or seven in the U.S. given the competition. Once you’ve reached those rankings then maybe it would be time to consider switching. In this case, though, I wouldn’t switch from Australia to the United States because you want traffic from both countries. Instead, I would target no specific country. There is a setting for that in Search Console. The reason I would recommend that is that if you have a global audience then there is little sense targeting users in any particular country. Because he is already on page one, have a look at some of the other phrases first in Search Analytics, and investigate other phrases that you may already be ranking for in that country and whether you can work on getting them higher. Hopefully that’s helpful and we’ll see you next week. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
