Search Engine Visibility

Being a new site, our aim was to achieve a reasonable visibility in the Search Engines as soon as possible, particularly Google. We followed all the guidelines on Search Engine Optimisation and are still continuing with link building, which is a never-ending process.

Being based in the UK, when using Google, the default is to go to google.co.uk with the radio button the web selected. Gradually, on the single keyword bodystocking we climbed the rankings and currently hover between page 2 and 3 on a Google search listing when displaying the default 10 URLs to a page. There are plenty of other variations on the bodystocking keyword along with other keywords such as sheer and opaque that are frequently used with it, but, as the majority of visitors to our site come from a bodystocking search we thought we'd monitor that one most closely.

However, we became concerned when we disappeared totally from the listings if the pages from the UK radio button was selected instead of the web. The worrying thing about this is that 95% of our business is from the UK, and we believe approximately 50% of UK users select pages from the UK when searching with the intention of buying. On the other hand, we found that if google.com was used instead of google.co.uk, we appeared consistently in the top 3 URLs on the first page. That would appear to be the dream position to be in, except it is primarily US visitors who see it, and the current exchange rate and time to deliver to the US do not make our site particularly desirable to US customers.

The reason for all of this is that we chose to use a .com extension for our website address as opposed to .co.uk. New websites have always been advised to use .com, if they can, as it carries more prestige. However, it can backfire if you want to be seen in a particular location, in our case, the UK. Google apparently uses the extension to help determine the location of a site, and for a .com it assumes the US, to start with. To further compound matters, Google also uses the site's IP address to work out in which country the site is located. Like so many other UK companies, our site is hosted in the US, mainly for cost reasons. So with an IP address located in the US, and a URL extension of .com, it is no surprise that Google sees us as a US website.

How do we remedy this other than changing our URL or moving our hosting to the UK? Well, Google does have a geo-location option that you can use to inform Google which location you wish to be seen in. We have set this to United Kingdom and so now wait to see what effect this will have on search listings. There are a few other minor things one can attempt on the home page to help advise Google where your market is, such as including an en-GB meta tag, and placing UK in the home page's title and description. That also has the benefit of making it clear to prospective visitors who see you listed that you are UK based as .com could well be becoming synonymous with the US now that so many UK companies automatically go for the .co.uk extension.

Time will tell how well this works and whether we do need to consider the other options of changing our URL or re-locating the web hosting, which would be a shame as we have been happy with the current provider.

It is also worth being aware as a surfer, that there are many UK based sites who use .com and have their sites hosted in the US, and so using pages in the UK could eliminate a lot of very relevant sites from your search listing.

This was brought to you by Bodystocking Avenue

POST EDIT: As of the 19th July, 2008 we have moved the site to http://www.bodystockingavenue.co.uk. Anybody visiting the original '.com' site will be redirected. We have done this in order to be more visible to UK surfers.