Google steps further strengthening local search

As most of the industry experts have envisaged search engine’s inclination towards local search. Google has further taken a step in that direction. Google has incorporated a specific tool in the Google Webmaster Central which allows webmasters to specify the geographic location of their website.

This is specifically useful for the sites who want to optimize for local markets. You might have noticed that “page from countryname” option below the search box that lets you choose if you want to search pages from that specific country/region. That’s the local search.

Google traditionally returns country specific results by using :

1. The Top Level Domain (TLD) of website.
Many websites have country specific TLDs like .co.uk for United Kingdom, .in for India, .ca for Canada etc. Google used to and will keep identifying the location by such country specific TLDs.

2. IP Address of host
Another way is knowing the IP of the web host. Location can be easily known with the IP address.

However these methods have certain limitations.

Not all websites have country specific TLDs
Many websites want to rank higher in local market but they have non-country specific TLDs like a .com, .net, .org etc.

Web Host may reside outside the country market
Many of you have experienced this. Your market is abc country and have servers hosted in xyz country. Like, i do not have American specific market for many of my sites, but my servers are mostly in America.

Google needed to find a solution for these problems, and i believe the tool they have come up with, very well addresses the problem.

However, things to note :
1. Google will keep associating a website for geographic location that is associated with the country level TLD, if it has any. Meaning, if you have a .co.uk, Google will consider it for local results for UK only. One cannot change this.

2. You can only specify the location in case you have a non-country specific domain name like a .com. And if you choose not to specify such information, Google will keep associating your site with the geographic location associated with your web host’s IP address.