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.

When things are changed in a website there is always the risk of falling out of the SERPs (search engine result pages). For search engines new is not necessarily better and they are all (and Google in particular) focused on trust. Search engines need to trust the new design as much as they trusted the previous one, and ideally enough information needs to be provided to them so that they know is still the same site.

So in order to freshen up the design while keeping enough consistency with the successful former site, we put together a redesign transition plan to break-down the steps needed to keep the rankings that took so much work to build.

Redesign transition plan

1. Url Optimisation. Since we wanted to keep consistency with the previous site and were not going to change site architecture dramatically, the best case scenario was to keep the same SEO friendly URLs with relevant keywords embedded in them and create new ones with the same criteria.
2. Internal Link Structure. We believed that a big part of current rankings was due to an effective internal linking structure that was reinforcing very clear site architecture. For the previous site, we used a site architecture technique called siloing, what simply means to split the focus of a site into multiple themes. The goal behind siloing is to create a site that ranks well for both its common and more-targeted keywords. The main objective here, was to make sure that the site structure remained the same and the site architecture followed the same principles, despite adding new pages.
3. Dealing with the content / adding new content. Since we managed to keep the site structure consistent, we also decided not to make big changes to the content that was working so well, but fine tuning some of the terms used and recommending additional content for some pages, as well as optimise content for the new ones, by optimising metatags and giving recommendations to the content creators on how to write the new content in a SEO friendly manner. Additionally, the site needed to incorporate media formats that could add dynamism to the text content. New videos were included to cater for that need and best practises were provided to optimise them accordingly.
4. Fractionation. We recommended to make the changes in small chunks and be involved in every step of the process, to ensure everything would work smoothly. This way we could manage any risk that could arise quickly and efficiently without being overwhelmed.
5. Monitoring. After the launch of the new design, we kept a very close look into rankings, visitors and page views to be ready for any major drawback. In addition, we tested the compatibility of the new design with the major browsers and gave recommendations on how to sort small incompatibility issues out.

In conclusion, as a result of an understanding of the possible caveats during the process and how search engines work, we and the client were able to keep the same rankings for the major selected keywords, increase rankings for some very competitive ones and increase the number of page views substantially, in addition to give the site a more modern and professional look.

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras

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.

We expererienced this very problem with a B2B client that was ranking very highly for very (VERY) competitive keywords in Google.com and nowhere near the top 50 in Google.co.uk. Being a company based in London, that was certainly hurting their revenue and they couldn’t work out why, since the domain (although a .com) was hosted in UK.

We suggested a few guidelines and a two-pronged strategy consisting of on-page/site wide additions and off-page tactics. We predicted that those changes would affect the geo-targeting in a reasonable period of time but the tactics took a while to make an effect. It is likely, and there is a buzz in Google groups about it, that google is working on tweaking their G-UK algo to fix this problem but we shouldn’t count with it.

On site suggestions

1. Use an address within the country . Register to local business center. The caveat is that the client didn’t have a physical location in UK. We suggested to use the location of their virtual office in Central London as a point of reference.

2. Use localised meta-data  for country, language and geographical location on the site pages:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”EN-GB”>
<meta name=”country” content=”United Kingdom”>
<meta name=”geo.country” content=”GB” />
<meta name=”geo.position” content=”51.52171-0.14228″ /> The 51.52171-0.14228(latitude;longtitude)
<meta name=”ICBM” content=”51.52171-0.14228″ />

These meta tags haven’t proved to be necessary to geolocalise sites but it was worth trying.

3. Use HTML address tags in the site pages. The content in the address tag will show up on the page .

<ADDRESS>Client address.<BR />
London Post Code, United Kingdom.</ADDRESS>

Again there is no conclusive evidence of this making a difference but some people had reported good results so it was worth trying.

Off-site suggestions

We analysed thoroughly the client linking profile and found out that only less than a hundred unique .co.uk domains were linking to the site out of the 15000 links that Yahoo indexed. Having more links from UK based sites should logically improve rankings for Google.co.uk as well as reinforce localisation.  We launched a specific link building campaign targeting UK sites and using anchor text with “UK” as the very first keyword. f.e “UK [client niche] services“.The idea was to emphasize the location, UK, to see if that could have an impact on geolocalisation issues.

Conclusions

After a few months the site was ranking for 68 new entries within the top 200 results, improvements in almost all the main keywords of rankings for Google.co.uk and an increase of 130% more traffic coming from Google with respect to the previous year. It is hard to say which of all these changes had a more significant impact but in our opinion submitting to Google Maps is a must in order to improve local search and geolocalisation issues and the impact of local links can’t be overlooked either.

Any additional ideas you could add in order to fix geolocalisation issues in your local search engines results?

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras