2 replies to this topic

[Distino]

Hi. We have a fairly successful online mens store which ranks high for all relevant search terms in Australia but I doubt (don't know how to check) that it ranks high in the US and Internationally. We have a PR of 4 which is strong enough in Australia but the site may not even come up on the first page in the US (although we do generate some sales to the US).

We are very keen to increase our sales into the US and Internationally and was hoping for some advice on how best to tackle getting a high ranking in the US search engines? Would we need to physically set up another site based from an IP in the US and start over?

We've tried PPC campaigns to the US however they are far too expensive for the priceset of the product we're selling.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[PatrickGer]

What keywords are you targeting? You say that you show up and doubt you show up on page 1 in OZ / in the US.

But do you know for which keywords? If you rank for a competitive kw in the OZ serps on page 1, but the US serps (search engine results pages) are too competitive for you - for that particular term - you could look into ranking for less competitive terms in the US.

Sorry in case Im reading too much into this, but this sounds like you do not have any kind of analytics package installed on your site.

PS: If your store is located in OZ, it might be difficult to rank in the US SERPs, as Google&co might prefer to have US websites show up for people who search in the US...as shipping costs/time would be lower for them. For example Im in Germany and for the same search queries I seem to have many more .co.uk websites show up than American friends who do that search from the US. And it makes perfect sense b/c of shipping time/cost.

[Randy]

The first step is to figure out where you now stand in terms of where your traffic is coming from. You should be able to break out this information in your web stats. Or if you're specifically interested in Google traffic you can use something like the Google Rank Extractor you'll see in my signature. (Mine is PHP based, 1DMF has ported it to Perl and added some charts and such, which is available as a link in his signature.)

And if it's a physical product that requires shipping you may be running into an issue where shipping times and/or costs simply make it prohibitive for buyers from the US to deal with. About the only way to overcome this is to partner with someone in the US to handle shipping in the US. Where you would send them inventory in bulk and they make a cut of each sale they ship. It's a cost thing, but it's also a delivery time thing. People just don't like waiting a week or more for something to get delivered in these times of immediate everything. Obviously this isn't such an issue if you're working with a web deliverable product or service.

Once those two are covered you finally come to the marketing side of things. Getting the word out to people in another country who would be interested in what you have to offer. What you'll find in a general sense is that most markets are more competitive in the US than in most other countries. Not only because the US is a bit more developed on the web marketing front than other places, but also because most sites in the US are .com's which isn't really US. It's worldwide. So when you're trying to compete in the US as a target market you end up having to compete against the whole world. So it can take a bit more time and dedication.