Competition for keyword positions has increased dramatically over the past year as website owners have started to realise the benefits of search engine marketing, pushed along in part by the increasing number of companies offering dedicated SEO services. The price of Pay-for-Inclusion and Pay-per-Click services have increased in tandem with the number of competing websites entering the indexes, leading to a situation where more money gets poorer results today than at any point in search engine history.
What were once fairly unbiased information search services are now (in general) sophisticated marketing systems where cash speaks louder than content. Going for a top listing on the major international engines not only means a big budget, but also thousands of competing sites all vying for your position. All is not lost however. Using regional search services will eliminate much of your competition, will cost less and will most likely lead to a higher return on investment with eventual site visitors being much more likely to buy. So if you are based outside North America, or sell outside the USA, give some thought to your Regional Search Engine Strategy.
The first thing you must consider is your target market, as this will have implications on your optimisation efforts. For example, if the UK is a target, you will need to use a UK domain name (such as .co.uk or .uk.com) to get into most UK specific search engines. Some domain authorities require you to have a registered office within a country before you can obtain a domain name. In these instances set-up a sub-domain using your existing address (e.g. uk.yourdomain.com), or go for a more generic domain (e.g. .eu.com to cover several European countries). This approach will usually work, although you might need to contact the editors directly if you fail to be listed. Your regional site should be tailored for the local market, including the use of local currencies and spelling.
Once you have your local site organised and a regionally biased title and description to hand you can begin submitting your site to the search engines and directories themselves. The first services to consider are the regional versions of the big International directories, namely Yahoo! and LookSmart:
Yahoo! Regional Search Yahoo! have 24 regional search sites around the world as well as individual portals for major World cities, all making up the Yahoo! Network. Websites can be submitted to each individual portal – with each region slightly differing in price. A UK & Ireland listing will cost you a one off fee of 199GBP. A German listing will set you back 149EURO, and Australia & New Zealand will cost the default Yahoo! Fee of 299USD per year! Each month 192 million unique users use the Yahoo! Network, and with an increasing shift towards the regional portals they are a must for regional search engine marketing.
BTLookSmart In their own words BTLookSmart use the world’s largest professionally edited directory database, with over 2.6 million URLs in more than 250,000 categories, to provide locally relevant, culturally sensitive content in 31 directories, spanning 28 countries in 13 languages. Despite recent criticism of LookSmart and their gradual shift to a Pay-per-Click model, a regional listing is still worth the money. Expect to pay 159EURO or 149GBP for a listing in which the usual optimization rules apply. A good listing on a regional LookSmart portal will still get you a boost on the corresponding regional MSN site, which makes the relatively expensive fee look more attractive.
Small Regional Specific Search Engines Don’t overlook smaller regional search engines and directories that serve your target area. These smaller sites often have agreements with larger International services to provide regional content, such as Europe’s Espotting supplying the Pay-per-Click content for Yahoo! UK & Ireland. Lists of these smaller engines can be found on dedicated search engine compilation sites such as SearchEngineWatch, who have a pretty good selection of regional search engines and make an ideal starting point. (http://searchenginewatch.com/links/Regional_Search_Engines/)
A great personal homepage that lists hundreds of regional engines on a simple site is provided by Phil Bradley. http://www.philb.com/countryse.htm can be used to check search engines and directories around the world.
There are also several country specific sites that will breakdown search engines by local areas and towns, such as the UK’s Search Engine Spy (http://www.searchenginespy.co.uk), which has a full list of National and regional search engines and directories within the UK.
Check you haven’t missed any regional search engines using a good search engine (e.g. Google). Don’t give up until you’re completely covered as this exercise will not only ensure that you’re completely accessible to your target audience, but will also serve to boost your link popularity.
The net result of your Regional Search Engine Strategy will be a regionally specific website that has good coverage on relevant search engines and directories and is accessible to its target market. By targeting individual regions separately you not only have a better shot at positioning your site higher in the rankings, but the eventual visitors will be more comfortable within the site, and much more likely to convert to a paying customer. Paul Fisher is the founder of Traffikka.com and is head of search engine research. Traffikka.com advises many major U.K. companies on search engine marketing. The company provides complete search engine optimisation, submission and reporting packages for all sized businesses and Web sites.
Paul Fisher is a professional in online search. He is also editor of http://www.shoutdown.net and is the founder of the global arts project http://www.theonemillionmasterpiece.com
