.au domain - where to host for Australian seachers

[emerald]

Hi mozzers,

I have a .au domain for a simple local service site for potential customers located in Sydney and around mostly, which will be a small basic site using Wordpress on Linux.

If i use US hosting but Google Webmaster Tools geotarget the .au domain to Australia would this be ok for local search in Oz? Or should I absolutely go for Australian based hosting? Is there a big difference still?

(USA hosting is more reasonable and I am familiar with the hosting companies for other sites, but this is my first time dealing with a site for Australian customers).

What are your recommendations or can anyone recommend any reasonable and reliable hosting for Australia for small sites?

Thanks!

[AndrewWheeler58]

Hi Emerald,

For local based queries being hosted in Australia, combined with a com.au domain, you will get an edge over the competition. Especially if the keyword choice is weak and the competition are using generic top level domains (.com/net) hosted outside of Oz.

That said, as you mentioned Google Webmaster Tools does a good job with geo targeting. As you are already using a local TLD, the default should already be set to Australia.

I had a quick look at some of the shared hosting options available to you, and the prices are on par with the big names in the US:

http://www.crazydomains.com.au/web-hosting/

http://www.digitalpacific.com.au/hosting/personal-web-hosting/

That said, you need to decide if your website will only ever deal with the Sydney area - if you are planning to expand globally you will need to define a new strategy. An Australian hosted website will load slower for the rest of the world, so if you are expecting global traffic in the future you may wish to consider a CDN (content distribution network, e.g www.maxcdn.com) to distribute your content to local servers.

There are plenty of options available to you however, more local TLD's, country specific sub folders etc that are outside the scope of this Q&A.

Another point to help boost your local presence will be to get as many local citations as possible. This is important from a 'local seo' perspective, so take the time to get listed. Here are few examples for the US & UK market:

http://searchengineland.com/top-50-citation-sources-for-uk-us-local-businesses-104938

And more specifically for you, the Australian market:

http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/local-seo/australian-citations/

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew

[CaseyKluver]

Hi Emerald,

First off, great response above by Andrew.

I just wanted to throw in a suggestion on using a web host such as site5. They are a US based company like you are looking for but they also provide the option to choose your server location - one of which is in Sydney Australia.

They should provide you everything you need with US support and reliability, but with a AU server location.

http://www.site5.com/hosting/web/ Just select your server location to get the details.

Thanks, Casey