SEO Blog - UK Search Engine Marketing News & Tips

Robin Goad from Hitwise posted an excellent report today looking at the search engine market share in the UK.

What I found interesting is that the “Pages from the UK” search option accounts for 13.6% of Google traffic. When you consider that in the UK www.google.co.uk has a 73.74% market share of UK searches (www.google.com has 13.77%) then 13.6% is a very significant number of searches!

Many UK websites are also more likely to convert into sales and leads from referred UK-based traffic so it’s essential you’re listed and ranking well for relevant searches to maximise your exposure from Google UK.

Below I’ve listed 5 important steps to consider towards localising a UK website:
1) Get Indexed: The first step is making sure your site is indexed for “pages from the UK” searches, in order to achieve this a domain name should either use a .co.uk TLD or be hosted in the UK.
2) Set location: Set your geographic target to the UK in Google Webmaster Central. You can even set individual locations for sub-domains or sub-folders if you have a uk.domain.com or domain.com/uk international website.
3) List address information: Ensure your address details are listed on your website, using this in the contact page and footer will help to show Google your physical location and may also boost rankings for “[keyword] in [town/city/county/UK]“.
4) Sign-up for Google Maps: Adding your business to Google Maps is unlikely to improve your rankings but it can’t do any harm and can get you listed for local searches on Google UK and Google Maps business searches.
5) UK link building: Building UK specific inbound links can also help to improve the relevancy of your website for Google UK searches.

I just noticed this new suggestion on Google AdWords:

Google Maps is a great way of getting your ads displayed online to a local audience so I’d recommend taking advantage of this and setting up your own local business ads.

While performing a search today for Bondi Beach I noticed a Google Maps location URL appeared as one of the normal listings in the Google.co.uk SERPs, as shown below.

Click image for full-size screenshot

This is the Google Maps result which is displayed:

Over the last few months Google have been using OneBox results to display maps at the top of the SERPs for local searches. They have also began using an embedded map link, but as far as I’m aware individual Google Maps locations shouldn’t be indexed and listed as a regular search result. Looking into the cached copy of this page shows that it is not indexed, this seems very strange as somehow it’s managed to get into the SERPs.

I haven’t seen this appearing for any other location so far and it doesn’t make sense that a page which isn’t cached is ranking for this term so could this be a test by Google?

Update: I’ve just noticed my own Bondi Beach rankings improve so Google seems to be doing a good job with this search after all!