Driving organic search traffic and sales through multinational search engine optimization requires a fusion of keyword relevance and geo-targeting to send location relevance signals. The search engines have to decipher a site’s geo-targeting signals to deliver the right page in the right language with the right SKUs, pricing, currency and availability. Optimizing the geo-targeting signals a site sends is critical to driving organic search traffic and sales in multiple countries.

Consider a searcher in the U.K. who wants to buy a toy for her daughter’s birthday. She searches Google U.K. for “dolls house.” Along with her query, the searcher is unconsciously sending location signals that the search is coming from a U.K.-based IP address and the query is in English. She may have also set her Google preferences to favor certain languages or countries. In response, Google quickly serves up all the pages from U.K. sites with English content relevant to “dolls house.”

An ecommerce merchant in the U.K. that serves only the U.K. market is most likely sending U.K. signals without even trying. Google can easily match the U.K. seller’s location signals plus its “dolls house” signals to the searcher’s desire to buy a doll’s house in the U.K. However, merchants with sites based in the U.S. who also serve the U.K. market and other English-speaking countries have a much greater challenge. Regardless of the strength of the keyword’s relevance, the number of relevant product offerings or customer service, U.S. merchants are not going to win the U.K. search or the U.K. sale if their multinational sites don’t geo-target their content to send U.K. signals.

How to Send Geo-targeting Signals to Search Engines

1. Register all relevant country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), such as .co.uk and .ca, even if the site’s content will be hosted on a general top-level domain (such as a .com). The ccTLD can then be redirected to the content’s true home on the .com to channel link popularity and customers.
2. Host the site’s content locally in each country. This can be fraught with business issues, and it isn’t a deal breaker if it’s not possible; but it’s a strong signal if it can be accomplished.
3. Build local links (ccLinks) in each country. The strongest ccLinks will mirror the site’s desired geo-targeting signals. For example, strong ccLinks for an English-language Canadian site would be hosted on a .ca ccTLD in Canada, and the content would be topically relevant and written in English.
4. Establish crawlable country navigation. A simple HTML country sitemap or crawlable navigation ensures a clear path for search engine crawlers to find and index country content.
5. Offer content in the local language. This signal impacts SEO by distinguishing between countries that speak different languages natively, such as geo-targeting the U.S. and France.
6. Register each country “site” in Google Webmaster Tools and geo-target each to a specific country. This is helpful whether a country “site” is hosted on its own ccTLD, or as a subdomain or subdirectory of a multinational domain.
7. Use the standard language and country codes in the URLs as the country’s subdomain or root directory, especially if it’s not possible to host the content at the ccTLD. These URL identifiers serve as a signal to observant humans to influence click-through in the search results, as well as sending a small signal to engines.
8. Establish language meta tags. While not generally considered a strong geo-targeting SEO signal, accurate use of country and language metadata can only help. Use the standard language and country codes to identify each site’s target either in a language meta tag or in the language attributes of the HTML tag.

Geo-location Challenges

Geo-location refers to the delivery of a default country/language content based on the visitor’s geographic location. Generally considered to be good usability practice, it can be disastrous if SEO concerns aren’t taken into consideration.

Consider the geographic footprint Googlebot leaves: California, U.S. Same with Yahoo’s bot, Slurp, and Bing’s MSNbot crawls from Washington. If geo-location occurs on every page of a site with no persistently crawlable navigation to all country/language sites, the search engines may only be allowed to crawl U.S. content based on the IP address. If this happens, only the site’s U.S. content will be able to rank in Google, Yahoo! and Bing, seriously limiting international traffic or sales. Analyze the URLs indexed in each country to determine if geo-location may be impacting SEO.

Indigo Sky built a dedicated flash microsite at www.simonellismusic.com, which included a live Twitter feed from the controversial Britney Spears ‘Circus’ World Tour Australian leg. Indigo Sky is also running a comprehensive social media strategy across Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, as well as SEO and Google pay per click ads

Simon Ellis was the Musical Director for Britney Spears ‘Circus’ Tour. Also a ITV & BRIT Award winning pop songwriter/producer/ musical director for artists like SClub7, Spice Girls & Jamelia

Indigo Sky launch clients include Britney Spears’ musical director and BRIT award winner Simon Ellis, and Image Foundry who recently won a BAFTA & EMMY award for their CGI studio work.

Founder Matt Thompson spent 2 years as Account Director at US-based digital agency, Booyah, where he led digital accounts for Coca Cola, Dish Network, Dominos and Thomson Gale.

Matt Thompson said: “The United States is the leader in online marketing and we have brought these developments to the UK market. There is a knowledge gap in the UK of US digital marketing innovations like video ad networks, cookie exchanges and search re-targeting and it’s our intention to fill that gap. US marketers are profitably employing tools & technologies which are still relatively unknown over here to extend audience reach, leverage their online data and ultimately drive sales. UK agencies simply aren’t talking to their clients about them. Indigo Sky are here to prove that the old ‘2 year technology lag’ myth of US innovations crossing the pond is a thing of the past.”

London-based Indigo Sky has already attracted attention as an innovative, forward-thinking agency in the areas of display/rich media planning & buying, e-commerce marketing, and social media.

Indigo Sky is a Google AdWords Qualified Company, a Yahoo Search Ambassador, Google Analytics Consultant, and member of TopSeos.com

1.) If any of your pages have the same title, change the titles to reflect the content of the pages. This is good for SEO because the search engines prefer pages with different names, and people are less likely to click on a search result if it has a generic title. Avoid using titles over 60 characters long.

2.) Add brief, descriptive “ALT text” tags to your site’s images. Internet users with text-only browsers will see this text in place of graphics. Its good for SEO because search engines can use this text to interpret the subject of an image, giving them a better concept of the page’s content.

3.) Test each of the links on your site to make sure they still work. If any produce errors, either replace, update, or remove them. This is good for SEO because some search engines will downgrade your site’s search ranking if it has too many outdated or incorrect links.

4.) If any of your pages contain information on more than one distinct subject, divide them into separate pages. For example, a page that lists every product a company offers should instead be split into multiple product categories (unless all of the items are very similar).

These SEO tasks can be accomplished in less than 2 hours for many web sites. However, they do not address other important SEO issues like keyword density, META tags, link building, and site maps. If in doubt consult i) an experienced search engine marketing agency, or ii) an internet marketing agency with experience in search engine marketing.