International Domains for SEO

[fastlaneus]

My company is international and we have websites for each country with Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD). I am in the US and I am seeing that other countries such as Costa Rica and Germany are ranking above us in search results. I thought Google automatically geo-targeted users by default and therefore I should only get .com or US results. Any idea why other countries would rank above our site?

[Dan-Lawrence]

Are you looking at rankings manually on Google results pages OR via rank tracking type software (such as Moz) ?

If the former then have you deleted history/cache etc and/or searched in incognito mode etc etc to help filter out subjective considerations like search & surfing history etc to try and make the results as objective as possible?, since if not that could be skewing the results ?

Have you geo targeted the websites to their target countries in Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) ?

In addition you can also apply 'hreflang' country/language attributes to further try & control which regional search results the various country versions appear in (but only of you definately don't want them appearing in US results too)

Just a few thoughts hope they help a bit !

All Best

Dan

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

Here is a little info I have shared with others on international SEO.

In order to rule out issues with your own sites, start by reading this checklist from MOZ as it will give you a great grounding and allow you to quickly identify and remedy any problems.

I would also read this article from Google as this will walk you through what you need to do.

HREFLANG will be used to explain to Google about international pages with duplicate content.

Any idea why other countries would rank above our site?

I would also like to know how you are determining these facts. If you are just searching from your own machine, there could be all kinds of personalisation getting in the way. If this is the case, use something like MOZ or Positionly, etc., to track SERP positions accurately.

If you are seeing these results from within a tracking app, then refer back to my first points above and check that everything is in order with your sites. You might stumble across an easy fix.

-Andy

[gfiorelli1]

Apart everything the others said in their answers, and taking for granted that you see others "foreign" web sites outranking yours, I would consider others things than just geo-targeting factors.

I looked at your web site (which is http://www.fastlaneus.com/... as I supposed reading your username here and searching for it on Google) and, if we consider the main keywords you are targeting:

"Authorized CISCO Training (non personalized SERP)

• I see Cisco ranking in the first 6 positions with its domain/subdomains... this is quite normal;
• I see newhorizons.com, which is a business company with a global presence and with a great link profile (1000+ unique linking domains and DA 63). It's ranking with an internal page, toward which they were able to build and/or earn some deep backlink from 7 unique domain names. This is a good practice in order to strengthen important internal landing pages. So, at first, it seems correct its presence;
• I see pearsonvue.com.. another huge company with global presence and with giant link profile. It ranks worst than newhorizons.com possibly because its on-site SEO is less than perfect, but it is the clear example of how having a great link profile still matters a lot;
• I see lrseducationservices.com, which is company smaller than the others (its a Pearson Vue Test Center too). It's 100% USA based (Illinois). It is not a web site we would expect to see ranking in page 1: a) Almost non-existent link profile and b) the page ranking is not exactly optimized for "Authorized CISCO Training". I don't have the time to dig deeper into the reason why Google shows this site, but I would not exclude a test Google does sometimes (showing something worth in the 1st page and start seeing user signals);
• Finally, in position 10, I see globalknowledge.com. Again another multinational company with a link profile much stronger than the one your site owns.

Good news... fastlaneus.com is ranking in position 11. This means that the situation is not that bad at all.

Maybe you should start thinking more about creating content marketing campaigns that can bring you:

1. Big links;
2. Great brand visibility;
3. Increase of branded and direct traffic.

Other things:

• Improve, then, the quality of your blog, so to earn more interested readers (I read few posts, and they tend to be a masked infomercial).
• Create content you promised with a link (webinars) and that in reality do not exist (I don't see any link to any webinar in the webinar page);
• The webinar page, as everything related to your "community" is sitting in a different domain name (http://fastlane-community.com/). I don't know the reasons of this decision, but maybe you should start thinking about consolidating the community part into the main web site.
• The infographic of your site are not really my style (too verbose)... and they lack of any opportunity to be share (no single page with social media buttons for social sharing and no text commenting the infographic, no embed code for the infographic... nada de nada)
• Your brochures/PDFs are indexed... why? a PDF like this http://www.fastlaneus.com/medi_a/pdf/Cisco-Training_US_8-pg_web.pdf substantially targets the same main keywords you want your organic html landing pages to rank.

And I could continue, but I stop because this is not the place for an audit :D... and also because imagine your site is not fastlaneus.com despite of your user name!!!! :D.

Everything you think about geotargeting and geo-localization of the SERPs is true in theory. In reality Google tends to show the sites it considers better responding to the search intents. And in this effort Google sometimes gets things wrong, as when it presents sites clearly targeting another country (and regional Google) in Google.com.

This also may happen for another reason that in the USA tends to be forgotten.

Formerly Google.com is not only for targeting the USA, but for targeting the global public. It is only because of recurring habit in the States and the same history of Google that made Google.com the preferred Google for targeting USA, so much that if you type in google.us, you are redirected to google.com (302 redirect).

To conclude this "essay"...

1. If you are targeting the USA public, then geo-target your site in Search Console (see links in the others answers);
2. Start thinking about my suggestions above
3. Implement the hreflang annotations, so to suggest Google what site should be presented to the users depending on their location and language.