Ever since their inception, the search engines’ mission has been to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. In order to cater to searchers across the world, the leading engines have established a national presence in most countries, presenting a blended set of nationally and linguistically relevant results. This month, Google announced the ability to specify a website’s target geographic area.
What is geographic localization?
In order to associate websites to their target geographic audience, search engines have traditionally taken an algorithmic approach that draws on factors such as domain extension (.co.uk, .fr, .ca, etc.), IP address location, language, and the geographical association of external links.
Why is it a problem?
Unfortunately, this automated approach relies on variables that do not hold final authority as to the geographic association of a given website. Whether in the name of scalability or ease of maintenance, or for simple business reasons, many global brands have centralized their online presence to a .com website hosted at a central location.
The methodology implemented by search engines has remained less than perfect for many years, which led to global giants such as IBM, HP, American Express and GE having their international websites poorly represented within country-specific search engines.
There are three considerations to bear in mind when discussing multilingual search engines:
- Country-specific search engines. E.g. http://www.google.pl
- Country indexes within each of the search engines.
E.g. Using http://www.google.pl but choosing to only return results from Poland would yield results from Google Poland’s country-specific index. (ex: hosted in Poland or using http://www.example.pl)
- Default web results for a country-specific search engine.
E.g. Running a query on http://www.google.pl without any language or country filtering. The results returned blend global results with the country index results. Websites pulled from the Country index often take precedent over global results. For instance, example.pl would rank higher than example.com/poland for a given keyword by virtue of its ownership of the Polish domain extension.
Google uses geo-targeting based upon IP address, so when visitors visit google.com, the vast majority of non-USA visitors will be re-routed to the local Google when possible (google.es or google.de).
Since the vast majority of non-US visitors get re-routed to their country-specific search engine, and given that the default search option returns a blended result set from global and country indexes, a global .com website will still be found within search engines. However, this inhibits the enhanced consideration attributed to a correctly geographically localized website.
Geographic localization gone wrong
To illustrate the problem, consider a global brand “ACME company” with international operations including Belgium. Historically, all of ACME’s international websites are hosted as a subfolder of their .com website. E.g: http://www.acme.com/be/. Whenever searchers try to find ACME within Google Belgium, the search engine results are dominated by their Dutch and French websites, which are far more popular and externally linked to.
Despite recognizing that this situation is not only frustrating searchers in Belgium but also preventing ACME from directing them to content relevant to their specific national needs, ACME cannot justify the cost/benefit of migrating their website to http://www.acme.be, nor switching hosting for their website to Belgium. Adding to their troubles, a well established, mid-sized Belgian company already owns http://www.acme.be!
To this day, little could be done to work around this situation, and ACME would have effectively been unable to help searchers reach them within this territory.
Solution
Although SEO tactics can be implemented to improve the situation, a simple, holistic answer has not been available until now. Google has taken the initiative to launch a feature allowing site owners to specify the geographic association of a website within its Webmaster Tools product. Although questions still remain about the full ramifications of such an action, this demonstrates a willingness to address a frustrating obstacle to successful multinational search marketing.
Conclusion
This new feature is not ideal for all websites; if a diversity of international traffic is an important contributor to your online strategy, activating a geographical preference would not be in your best interests. However, if your target geography is mission critical or you have had the foresight to logically organize your website content to respond to particular geographical boundaries, this enhancement represents a long-awaited opportunity for greater control and visibility within those target markets.