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?
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