Can Google Really Deliver Country Specific Searching?

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Can Google Really Deliver Country Specific Searching? By: Martin
Lemieux

This is a serious matter, can Google really deliver top quality
search results for other countries? The answer so far is “sort
of”. In this article I will use Canada as an example of the
quality or lack of thereof, that is delivered by Google’s search
results.

Let’s take a look at Canadian search results by Google.ca:

When you highlight “Canada” through Google search results and
then start searching, you may be surprised at the amount of
companies that aren’t really Canadian. All of this also applies
for the UK and other major markets as well…

In fact, many of the “paid results” come from American
companies. Now some would argue that this is to be expected,
coming from American companies with large budgets but I would
disagree because a lot of the bulk of the “Canadian specific”
results are also American companies.

It is quite evident that this is a growing concern with business
owners residing in different countries.

As an owner not from the US, I would rather compete with
companies that are more local than not, simply because the
results would then be relevant. Irrelevant results equal to poor
results and less people take the search results seriously when
they keep sifting through poor quality results online.

For example; If you highlight “search in Canada” and search for
“web design“, the top 2 results seem not to be from Canada. This
is a serious issue. What if people click on “I’m feeling lucky”,
they are redirected to a company outside of Canada. The average
person won’t know what to think about that and may disregard
searching through Canadian results any further.

The more content specific the results are, the more people will
search through those results. The more people will tell their
friends & peers to search through those results. See, as web
marketers, we do have the power to create a search term that
people get familiar with. Just look at “Blogging”. A couple of
years ago, if you asked people to search online for “blogging”
sites, you would have had a lot of confused faces staring at
you. Nowadays, if you search for blogging, there are more than
900,000 results found in Google and to top that off, there is
more than enough paid advertisers as well.

What do we see changing in Google?

The #1 thing we are now seeing more and more is search results
listing websites with country specific domain name extensions.
Here’s what I mean by that….

If you were Google and you wanted to deliver better search
results for Canada, how would you go about doing that?

I would look at 2 things:

1) Does the domain name end with .ca? (Ex. www.smartads.ca) 2)
Does the “contact” information about the company match the
country – Street, City, Province/State, Country. Are all of
these factors listed within the contact page?

These are very important factors, evidenced to the fact that, I
see Google weighing your “contact” page higher than anything
else within your website other than your front page. So the
moral is, make sure to list EXACTLY where it is that you do
business within your contact page. Your website will rank higher
for local searching when this technique is utilized.

Second, make sure to buy a domain name(s) that is country
specific. If you live in Canada, buy a domain with the extension
(.ca). If you live in the United Kingdom, make sure to buy a
domain name with the extension (.uk). If you live in the US,
make sure to buy a domain name with the extension (.us).

You may be asking, what if I don’t want to concentrate on just
local searching? Create a separate website to target different
areas. There is nothing with .com, in fact most people
automatically type in .com but, if you truly want to target
locally, you have to play locally.

The future of search engines is local searching! We are seeing
an increasing amount of evidence to sustain this claim.
Targeting locally is a great start and will ultimately help you
to target internationally later on!

I hope this article helps you out!

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