A software vendor client was ranking really well for several important keywords that were driving a lot of traffic to the site since we got involved in the project back in early 2000. The site outranked the competition for most of the selected terms. However, by analyzing closely our web analytics tool, we could notice that the visitors that arrived to the page were not hanging around as long as expected and the number of page views wasn’t as high as expected. As a result, the client and we agreed that it was time to get the best out of the organic traffic being generated by the optimisation, by giving the site a makeover to adapt it to the new times.

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Working on International SEO projects on a regular basis makes you realize how complex search can be sometimes and the number of subtle nuances that challenge your SEO knowledge and fundamental day in and day out. At the end of the day we are trying to figure out a huge mathematical equation (search engines algorithm) without knowing the variables, and all we can do is to test and hypothesize.

For numerous clients sites that have been trying to address a more international audience we have discovered that disparities of rankings between Google.com and Google.co.uk are very common, even if the sites in question have a British IP address. Ranking better in Google.com for sites hosted in UK is a kind of glitch not unusual and traditionally UK sites have been disappearing inappropriately for Google.co.uk top rankings in benefit of Google.com. The algorithms are slightly different and the language commonalty doesn’t help. There is an interesting case of a .co.uk site about a small village in England that ranks much better in Google.com than in Google.co.uk despite the neutral domain code termination (.org) . After a deluge of complaints from British webmasters about this, Matt Cutts from Google had to lay out an official response that underlined the importance of the local domain.

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