Australian local business website on a dot.com - how do I ensure its indexed/ranked by Google.com/au as priority

[bisibee1]

look forward to your advice

My client is a local business in australia but has a dotcom site which is hosted in US.  We are just moving it to wordpress and new hosting.

I want to ensure that Google.com/au will be able to index and rank the content.

How can I tell google its a site for people in australia?

I thought best to set up a subfolder like this hissite.com/au and redirect anyone from australia to go to this url?

Thanks for your recommendations

[DougRoberts]

I've got a client in a similar situation. They have a .com domain but they only offer services in Australia.

The good news is they rank just fine for the search terms that are relevant to their business (these are primarily queries with local intent).

In Webmaster Tools, you'll want to tell Google that your site is targeted to an AU audience. There's an option to set this under "Search Traffic" -> "International Targeting".  Click the "Country" tab and then you can choose to target users in a particular country.

We also made sure that it was very clear from the content on the site that the business was based in Australia paying particular attention to local search optimisation (See: http://moz.com/learn/local ) - getting local business listings in reputable, authoritative directories etc.

It's best to think of it from a visitors point of view - what are the on-page signals you need to provide to give them confidence that they are dealing with an Australian site. (Local address, Australian phone number, mentions of relevant places / people / events, associations/badges/certifications from relevant Australian bodies etc...)

Hope this helps - Good Luck!

Doug.