Although I live in Australia at the moment, I am an Englishman and most of my SEO and marketing has been done in the UK. I consider UK engines to be much easier to optimize for than US engines as the competition is less. It is possible therefore to be successful working with a broader niche when marketing using natural search in the UK as opposed to the USA.
When marketing to a local audience (and by local here I mean anywhere but the US) most marketers overlook the fact that your whois information is freely available in most cases to the search engines, and that other factors such as the location of your hosting are easy to determine.
Local engines already give trust to ccTLD’s (country code Top Level Domains), and I predict this is set to increase as search algorithms improve. Consider this before you buy domain name. Most local engines are not as advanced as global engines, and often the marketers working these areas are not as sophisticated as those playing in the big money arenas.
Last year I had a great deal of success with MSN UK. The weighting given to UK domain names and especially UK web hosting by MSN was unreasonable; I could rank first for some fairly major keywords by using a UK domain registered at my UK address, UK hosting, and a few low quality inbound links (just to get indexed). No real on-page optimization was necessary, and the quality of content did not seem to be relevant at all. Although MSN’s traffic levels are nothing like Google’s, being in the top spot for many high value keywords made me some good money 
There is no geographic restriction on owning a UK domain like there is on owning .us domains, and registration is cheaper than .com’s. Nominet, the UK domain registry, give non-trading individuals an ‘opt-out’ option on whois.
If you are serious about doing business online in the UK from abroad, consider registering a UK Limited company. It is a fairly cheap and simple thing to register a UK Limited company online. Most ‘company formation’ companies offer a registered address service which is a UK address at their offices that will suffice for the purposes of registering and administering UK domains.
Having your UK domain registered to a UK address, or your whois information hidden, may be a good thing in the eyes of the search engines. If they aren’t using this information in their ranking algorithms for local search now, it would make sense that they will in the future.
One way for your link monkey to hunt down other local sites to beg links off is to use a reverse IP lookup on a small site that is hosted in the correct country. Small sites tend to be on shared hosting and many shared hosting packages also share IP addresses.
In summary, when marketing to local search engines:
- Register a ccTLD (possible bonus points for local address for the registration).
- Host within the country.
- Aim for a good proportion of links from sites with the same ccTLD you are working with & also hosted locally.
Useful links:
January 19th, 2007 at 8:50 am
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