In this post I’d like to talk about targeting local markets with SEO. I’ve never done this before and it seems as my big flaw, as sometimes targeting local markets is much easier than conquering US market that is not always the best converting market out there.
About 3 weeks ago I got email from my affiliate program announcing massive offline promotion of some product in the UK in June.
From my experience in PPC, I know that if the product is featured in local newspapers, it becomes a gold mine since it’s much easier to convert due to the “trust” factor” that removes a lot of friction from potential customers and make them buy like crazy.
I even didn’t analyse the US competition for the product keyword, because I decided to build product review site for UK specifically. All I done for research is Google Insights. All my main 3 keywords are at the peak of popularity now, that’s all I need, don’t really care about exact search volume since google gives inaccurate data often or no data at all.
I ordered content, bought local domain (co.uk, org.uk etc), and bought local UK hosting. My first post on this new site was made on June 25 – 2 weeks ago. On June 28 I added last post – actual product review (money page).
On July 1 I made a screenshot showing how google treats local domains and hosting: 
I used Traffic Travis since Rank Checker was bugging a lot at that time. You can see “previous” results and “top” results and they differ a lot! In fact, both SERPs were tracked with 5 minutes interval, first – google US and then I switched to google UK (my targeted search). In google UK my “local”-optimised site got much higher positions than in google US. This boost is due to domain sitting on the local hosting in UK.
Initial Promotion
Since I was very lazy to work a lot because of very hot weather here in my place, I relied on automatic way of promotion. The only manual thing I did was submission of 3 articles to Ezinearticles directory, targeting both domain and inner pages.
Next, I got press release written and submitted mostly to free press release sites that allow anchored backlinks.
Last, each day from July 2 I added 10 to 30 profile backlinks with SENuke to my main domain targeting 3 main keywords:
product
product uk
buy product
2 Weeks Later – Rankings and Sales
Now my today’s rankings are as follows:
In just 2 weeks Yahoo ranks my site #1 for buy product keyword, and yesterday I made 2 first sales. Today I made another sale already, and as the product converts even from Yahoo, I can imagine how many conversions I can get from google UK top positions, since the lion share of traffic is in G.
Now I will add more content to the site and do more SEO for google rankings, the competition is fierce so I need good link velocity to get to the top in UK.
I will update my blog, however in this month I’m mostly working a lot on evaluating my current SEO strategies and not much on actual link building. Too hot to work all day… I don’t expect big income this month, as sales are really very slow in my main markets. However, I also do some conversion improvement on my CPA site, testing different call to action texts, banners and even fonts. This deserves another post )
Related posts:
That’s really interesting. I sometimes target both the US and UK in a single website, and use separate categories, plus page titles (I mention “US” or “UK” in the title depending which I am targeting on that particular blogpost/page).
I do get traffic from both (and sales from both), but you now make me wonder if I would have better results having two separate websites (a .com and .co.uk for the UK).
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Hello Teatree!
Yes I did this also and got sales from different regions, and I also noticed interesting thing that really made me some good incomes – my site got top 10 rankings in several countries after I made some backlinking (even nofollow) from sites that were hosted on local hostings in those countries. Or had local domain extensions, like co.uk, au, etc…
In fact, I know fore sure that google gives a boost to local domains hosted on local hosts, so as my screenshots show, in google.co.uk my site initially ranked higher than in google.com.
Co.uk domain + UK based host and you have a real edge in local google SERPs. If the product gets massive offline publicity in specific region, the conversion rates are typically very high in this region.
My now 3-weeks old site converts like crazy, making me 1-2 sales daily now. THe commission is really low, but will be bumped soon so I hope to see more returns.
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