Tell us where you are if you want to be found

Where are you? There’s this amazing new restaurant, it’s local, has good prices, atmosphere and excellent food. The only problem is the marketing. They advertise in Australia when the business is in England. And the cook lives in Peru .

You may snort with derision and say that nobody is that stupid but this is exactly what people do with their websites.

The search engines use the TLD or country code as the prime indicator for local results. So for example if you are in Germany then .de websites will nearly always take preference over other country codes. If the search engine isn’t sure about the website it will look at the IP address of the hosting server.

So if you have a .com domain hosted in the USA then don’t expect your restaurant site in Abergevenny to even appear in the UK searches.

Even worse is to have your .com registered in the USA and redirected using frames to a cheap server somewhere in Asia . The search engines will just give up and list someone who does make it clear where they are.

And just because your host is based in your country doesn’t mean their servers are. 1&1 is a major provider in the UK but its servers are in Germany . This means that every domain with a generic TLD (com, org, info etc) won’t necessarily be indexed as a UK business.

A recent client has exactly this problem. Because they use 1&1 even thought they have a .co.uk domain they don’t appear in a UK only search.

So what’s moral of this story? Help your visitors (both human and robot) to work out where you are. Buy a country specific domain, host it locally and make sure your location is clearly indicated on the site (page titles and footers).