IP address geolocation

[evansluke]

I would classify our site as large (www.covers.com), with our primary target being traffic within the US (about 70%) but I have a feeling we are limited by our IP being located within Canada. I have changed all the targeting to the US in WMT, but could undertake a project to virtually 'move' the site to a US IP, if there would be benefit. I have found articles coming down on both sides of the issue.

Thoughts?

[evansluke]

Some more context: we get a large and disproportionate quantity of traffic from Canada, which generally indicates we are being treated as 'Canadian content'.

[Highland]

Physically hosting your server in a target country does help, but that help is miniscule. In Geotargeting, the largest signals come from your link profile. So if your links come from the US primarily, you should rank better in the US. You also have a genertic TLD instead of a ccTLD, which helps.

Some possible actions to help your site be seen as US would be to do some marketing within the US. Another option is to see if you can get covers.ca and then work on geotargeting that site to Canadians. That would send a strong signal that covers.com is aimed at the US.

[evansluke]

Thank you. We did try to have a .uk version of our site, which failed, but there was less of a focus on making that change for SEO reasons. I will keep the country TLD in mind going forward. We are on the verge of some language-specific content so that might be a good time to consider this.

Thanks!