If your think you rank well in Google, think again..

Google's Geo-targeting and your Position

Working on Search Engine Optimization, you have to think about the people who are searching for a specifiek term and how you can be found.

But what if you are trying to reach an audience form an other country?
Let say you want people from Europe to find your Camper Rental site in the US.
Just when your SEO Company or Consultant has brought you to the top of http://www.google.com/ you find your visitors only come from the USA Region.

What is happening?

The reason for this is because Google, and other Search Engines, use a system called Geo-Targeting.
In short, they look at you IP address range and focus the content of the Search Engine Results Page on your networking environment
Thus providing you with results close to your area. 

That is why you sometimes get a different result when running the same query form your home and from your work place.
If that happens, aks your network administrator if your connection to the Internet is running via a provider in an other country.

How to Check the Foreign results

First thing you can try is to change your preferences in Google and set it to a different language for the results.

Or try out the functions on http://oy-oy.eu/google/world/ , now the site may look like an Adsense scraper site, but it really isn't!
There are really nice functions on checking your website and information on several aspect of your website.

One other site to look at, to see the results from Yahoo side of things, might be http://www.pagebull.com/ which show you the search results as click able screen shots, and you can select a country to search from. Really nice with suprising results.  

How to overcome this problem

Actually, the best thing to do is to create a new website with an extension focused on that region.
For instance use a .eu domain next to your .com website
Also choose a provider for that website in the region you want to target.

If you are from Europe and want to target the USA, pick a USA Based provider….
I know, I didn't, but I just created Design-cars.com as an SEO study object (O Boy, did that turn out as a large knowledge enviroment..:-))

One other thing thats is easier to do, is to check with the above mentioned tool who you are competing with and learn from their sites…

Yes, doing the analysis again and do the Optimization again… its an on going effort.

If you know of other options to solve this problem, please share the knowledge by commenting!