Do you remember our experiment to split our sitemaps for geo-targeted SEO? Ten weeks ago we implemented multiple sitemaps to geo-target the UK and Ireland sections of our website to their intended audiences. The initial part was easy – it took a few minutes to create separate subfolders and set a target country in the Google’s Webmaster Tools. The harder part was to monitor its influence and measure the results.
We chose a control group of 200 pages and monitored their rankings on Google.com, Google.ie and Google.co.uk. Many competing factors can affect the position of a page in the search results but we were hoping that as a result of geo-targeting the British and Irish pages that they would improve their rankings on Google.co.uk and Google.ie respectively.
Unfortunately that’s not what happened. Our Irish pages dropped in the search results by 1-2 positions on average, both on Google.ie and Google.com. On the other hand, the UK pages improved their rankings by 2-3 positions both on Google.co.uk and Google.com. It’s impossible to draw a valid positive or negative conclusion based on these results. However, we can say it hasn’t been a success and that’s why we’ve stopped the experiment and gone back to the old way.
We’re not very disappointed by these results as everybody knows that SEO-ing a website on a .com domain, all in English, but targeted to audiences in many countries all around the world is not that easy. We keep trying though, testing, experimenting and sharing what we’ve learned with you. Do you have any other ideas we could try out?
[...] We’ve finished testing this now so go have a read of the results of our geo-targeted sitemaps test. [...]
Hi Marta,
Great that you have been testing it. I have to add though that I never said or thought it would increase the rankings directly, creating these sitemaps and geotargetting them is meant to help the engines know where you want the different pages indexed and ranked. I.e you want the /UK pages ranked in Google.co.uk whilst you are wanting the /IE pages indexed in Google.ie I suppose it’s the most useful when you are targetting loads of different countries. It’s not likely to help your rankings on its own, but it indirectly did for us,as the pages within our /FR folder wasn’t even within the first 50 pages before we did the geotargetting. We were simply helping Google see that we were wanting those pages within the /FR folder to be indexed in Google.fr and not within google.co.uk.
I’ll add an edit to my blogpost to make it clearer that this is not a tip for increasing ranking but for helping Google index pages in the right country.
Lisa
Comment above good……and I’m pretty sure you guys are aware that Google admits to using ‘IP address’ as the default geo location indicator for non geo specific TLD’s like .com/.net etc (unless you specifically indicate otherwise by use their geolocalisation webmaster tool) .
Your IP address looks like it is geo-located in the US, so I’m wondering if you have considered using local IPadressing to give you the effect you are looking for. Some hosting infrastructure providers can provide IP addresses on their international networks for use by clients who want to target different geo locations using ‘local’ ip address from a single application.
One solution suggests seting-up local subdomains i.e. uk.revahealth.com and allocating a UK ipaddress to this “localised site”.
Regards,
Jeremiah Ryan – Active Online
Hi Jeremiah
Thanks for dropping by. We have looked at all of these options and are planning on experimenting with the IP address option, although I believe Google have recently reduced the importance of it. However, it is still worth testing.
We previously ran a test using .co.uk and .ie domains with negative results. Our conclusion that the new domains didn’t have the trust or authority required. I suspect uk.revahealth.com would be the same.
Hi
I have been running this experiment for a global as well for purely indexation requirements on the correct country engines.
I’ve noticed the link equity has been split out to the country sub-folders while the TLD maintains its own. This might explain your drop in rank.
Julian
That might explain it Julian. I noticed in your own blog post that you said you thought that this could be managed. What are your thoughts on how to do that?
People talk about best practices for global SEO but this is such a new (and dynamic) area that the best policy is keep doing what you are doing – test and learn. And if one tactic doesn’t work, I would not assume that this will always be the case. One change in the Google algorithm and hey presto, that solution that didn’t work may now be the correct one.
What I would do in your situation is go back to the basic assumption that Google serves different results on Google.co.uk than Google.ie because it believes people in the UK are searching for different information than people in Ireland. From this assumption, you can then infer that Google.co.uk is technically a different search engine from Google.ie and thus you should optimise for each separately. Continuing this line of thinking, the method that provides the most flexibility (and I would think the most likelihood for success) is to use the split domain approach. This will allow for testing on a country-specific basis rather than trying to find one solution that works for both countries.
This strategy is, of course, far more resource intensive but for a company whose success is highly dependent on generating traffic from organic search results, it would appear to make the most sense.
Alec, I think one of the things that Google is getting better at is working out the relevance of a page to users in a particular location based not only on TLDs but also on URLs and the content of the page, which ties into your idea that you can optimise for each search engine.
I’m doing up a post about this at the moment, but the short version is that people in Ireland searching using just the singular keyword “dentist” are landing on our page /dentists/ireland, and people in Singapore doing the same search are landing on /dentists/singapore.
Clearly the user’s location is being used as a signal by Google to determine what results are relevant when a generic keyword is being entered. This would imply to me that having separate TLDs for each country certainly isn’t necessary, although I don’t doubt it could be of help in the long run.
I absolutely agree. My point was that separating TLDs allows for more flexibility in testing to discover what works best in each country.
@Philip
You manage the link graph geo-signals.
There will be country and language specific links in the site profile. So deliberately migrate your URL’s and 301 at language directory level to country level. That way you maintin the top profile but you build a link library at country level as well.