how to get top listings on country specific search engines

[totallyenglish]

hi!

i'm about to go live with a couple of sites.

for one of them i'm really trying to get to specific european countries, and we're not talking about the UK.

Places like Moldova, Romania, Latvia.

Now, if I pay a fortune on PPC or send all the details to Google or similar, i'm sure i can get high listings on google.Com, but as this company has no intention of doing business in america is this a waste of time?

For example i know if I search msn.co.uk i'll only get UK companies, so surely people searching these countries will only get local listings too, most of the time. If my domain is .com and i don't really want 15 different domains (tried registering one in belarus?) how best reach MY target audience?

secondly, while we're on the subject, I'v e been told that bidding for keywords, pay-per-click or any other names it might go under is really cost effective. is this ture? i really have a budget for both my sites, and some of the words are popular, so is this really the best way?

many thanks, neil

 

[jobo123]

Hi,

I would have thought that to target so specifically to these three countries, you might need three country specific url's. Just by looking on Google I quickly found a Latvian search engine:

http://search.latnet.lv/

All the sites it lists seem to end in .lv so if you really only want to do business in these countries, I think you need url's for Moldova, Romania, Latvia and to set up sites in appropriate languages. The sites would be specific to users in these countries and prevent any significant traffic from other regions due to the language barrier.

If you don't want the hassle & cost of all the separate domains and web pages, you could perhaps have a single web site with a statement indicating the geographical coverage of your area of business - this should make this issue clear to visitors from outside. If you list the names of the countries you do want to do business in this would also help for people searching the web from within these countries. For example, if someone was searching for productX with availability in Moldova, your site should do well because so few others will have productX and the country name Moldova.

Hope this is of use,
jobo123

John Davy-Bowker
www.dbLetterWriter.com

 

[totallyenglish]

Many thanks.

I'm still confused though.
I guess what i want to know is: if i buy a .com or .net will this get me LOWER rankings in local countries, or will their engines be using mainly google etc and just do it on keywords.

language ain't an issue- my target maarket ill speak english anyway, but to buy the local domains of 5-6 countries will set me back up to 1000 dollars, THEN they all need to be hosted, or they won't get hits at all, surely?

thanks, neil

 

[jobo123]

Hi Neil,

Yes, I don't think a whole raft of separate sites and domains is really a very good solution. You might get some benefit from local search engines that specialise in country specific domains but generally I would think that a single site that is carefully optimised for your target audience is much better (and cheaper), especially if you are expecting most visitors to be working in English.

As mentioned before, I think it would be best to optimise by including text with the country names and the thing(s) you are selling. e.g. If I was in Moldova and wanted to buy a car, I guess I would probably put the following in Google:

car moldova

if you do this, you get a whole stack of highly relevant sites. This is probably where I would start on the optimisation.

All the best,
John Davy-Bowker

John Davy-Bowker
www.dbLetterWriter.com

 

[totallyenglish]

many thanks! i totally agree.........

neil

 

[Wullie]

forum828

Hope this helps

Wullie

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http://www.freshlookdesign.co.uk

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