subject: Google Changes: Can Google Really Deliver Country Specific Searching? [print this page] This is a serious matter, can Google really deliver top quality search results for other countries? The answer so far is "sort of". In this article I will use Canada as an example of the quality or lack of thereof, that is delivered by Google's search results.
Let's take a look at Canadian search results by Google.ca:
When you highlight "Canada" through Google search results and then start searching, you may be surprised at the amount of companies that aren't really Canadian. All of this also applies for the UK and other major markets as well...
In fact, many of the "paid results" come from American companies. Now some would argue that this is to be expected, coming from American companies with large budgets but I would disagree because a lot of the bulk of the "Canadian specific" results are also American companies.
It is quite evident that this is a growing concern with business owners residing in different countries.
As an owner not from the US, I would rather compete with companies that are more local than not, simply because the results would then be relevant. Irrelevant results equal to poor results and less people take the search results seriously when they keep sifting through poor quality results online.
For example; If you highlight "search in Canada" and search for "web design", the top 2 results seem not to be from Canada. This is a serious issue. What if people click on "I'm feeling lucky", they are redirected to a company outside of Canada. The average person won't know what to think about that and may disregard searching through Canadian results any further.
The more content specific the results are, the more people will search through those results. The more people will tell their friends & peers to search through those results. See, as web marketers, we do have the power to create a search term that people get familiar with. Just look at "Blogging". A couple of years ago, if you asked people to search online for "blogging" sites, you would have had a lot of confused faces staring at you. Nowadays, if you search for blogging, there are more than 900,000 results found in Google and to top that off, there is more than enough paid advertisers as well.
The #1 thing we are now seeing more and more is search results listing websites with country specific domain name extensions. Here's what I mean by that....
If you were Google and you wanted to deliver better search results for Canada, how would you go about doing that?
Google Changes: Can Google Really Deliver Country Specific Searching?
