website Based in India But need traffic from Europe and North America

[TPS2013]

We are  based in India but have all our  prospective clientele in Europe and North America.

The problem is ; despite all our efforts we are getting almost 60% traffic from India which is not our target region.

We have already tried following

1. hosting our website on US server

2. adding GB and US language tags

3. webmaster target region only allows  one country so we cannot set the target there

Apart from this any other suggestion?

Prashant

[Chris.Menke]

Prashant,

Links and social engagement signals from within your target geography show that your offerings have some "importance" in those places and having google recognize your importance, or authority, is critical.  In addition, remember that ranking nationally for products and services is tough.  Think about focusing on specific cities as target markets, rather than on the countries themselves. Be prepared for a long, uphill battle when you're based in one country and trying to get your customers from another.

[TPS2013]

Chris

All our social media posts are pertaining to US or Europe clients only. Nothing relevant to India. When you say “focusing on specific cities” does it mean that target city name should be the part of our content?

Prashant

[Chris.Menke]

Yes, choose a smaller city and figure out what it takes to show up for searches for you services + city name and then replicate that for other/larger cities.  That's really what anyone has to in their own country.

[Antony_Towle]

Apologies as its a long shot as i assume you may not have one,

But i always find that a local address on the site helps, We include this in the site wide footer,

James

[TPS2013]

Sorry but non of the above suggestions are  working. As per my further research it looks like Google takes multiple signals to identify  including address on contact page , If publisher and author tag location. (if these are available)...

[Maayboli]

It all depends on relevancy of content and other signals.  But also for a new site, it is just far harder to rank for US and west European countries. There is so much competition for those countries and less in India so it is easier to rank there. You may not need this , but I am thinking it would be far easier to rank for African countries now  but the traffic you may get is not meaningful for you.

I am sure you may have already taken care of this, but GWT has a setting to signal which country you want to target.

[Zippy-Bungle]

We have a similar problem, but in reverse. It's a UK website that needs to rank in Asia but not UK.

We've tried a few things - shifting the server made no difference (nor the speed benefits) and geo locating on webmaster tools was pointless as we have a 5 country target market. Targeting cities again didn't help because the number of location targeted searches was sub 1% for the relevant keywords.

So there were two things that we did that seemed to have some benefit. First we targeted some non valuable but relevant keywords with high search volumes (2 orders of magnitude more than our real targets) and got a high ranking for that. Then put our effort into getting this traffic to convert to the non-ranking pages.

Secondly because there was non substantial difference in EU and Asian ranking for our keywords we focused on ranking well in Europe and then just filtered out the EU and US traffic and we saw benefits.

What I'd do here in your case is focus on the Indian market to get lots of relevant back links. It should be easier than the US in someways and take advantage of the size of the market and it's lack of sophistication to increase the volume of keywords. If websites are anything like they are in Asia there is a lot of crap design and zero optimisation. So it should be possible to put together an outreach package that generates lots of low DA links that are very relevant for lower costs than in the US.

So for example if you were looking at outsourced accounting I'd build link bait that appeals to Indian accounting firms to get the links to your key pages - but optimise them for US consumption.

Of course all this depends on your market and keywords but I hope it's given some ideas.