What is the best way to rank well on both Google.co.uk & Google.com?

[PaulSimms]

I am working on a website that is primarily a UK based software company but is now expanding into the US.

The website is a .com site and is not geo-targeted to any specific location. Currently the site ranks well on Google.co.uk for a number of the focus keywords. We are now targeting Google.com as well to increase visibility in the USA.

The site is ranking number 1 for one of the focus terms on Google.co.uk but no where to be seen on Google.com but on another term the site ranks 3rd in both Google.co.uk and .com. There are a number of other terms that rank on the first page in Google.co.uk and on the 3rd or 4th page in Google.com.

The server is located in Germany and I do not want to geotarget the site to the US as I am concerned this would have a negative impact on the .co.uk ranking. The site currently has a mix of .com and .co.uk links pointing back to the site, in actual fact possibly more links actually come from US sites already.

My original plan was to just focus on building links back to the target pages from US sites rather than creating a US folder on the site and geotargeting that section of the site in WMT and having to build page authority for a completely new page with no existing backlinks.

But now that I have a number 1 ranking on .co.uk and the same term not ranking at all in .com as well as a postion 3 ranking for a term in both .co.uk and .com I am slightly confused as to the best options.

Any help, advice, opinions would be greatly appreciated.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Paul,

As you already know there are a couple of ways to approach this. Opinions will vary, but with the details you have given I would be tempted to do as you originally thought, keep building links from US based sites. There must be some US based blogs, review sites etc that cover your software field (?), those would be the first place I would look at for getting some more relevant US links.

Keep in mind that not all .com sites are US oriented so even though you say you have more US links than UK, if this is only based on the domain then it might be a bit more complicated than that.

You have not mentioned what your keywords are, but software type keywords might have some pretty different keyword difficulty scores between the US and the UK, which might account for your #1 ranking in the UK and nowhere to be seen in the US. That being said, since you are ranking in both for other keywords that is an indication that ranking in both is at least possible with the setup you currently have.

If you have not done so already, it might be worth putting a news page or a blog post on your site about the expansion into the US market. If you run a blog then I am sure there are some other content ideas you could come up with that detail US specific data for your particular software field which would give you some nice content to use when approaching people for links.

Hope that helps!