Foreign Perspectives

You might not think it, but it makes a substantial difference because google and other search engines use geotargetting.

This is fine if your website is country-specific (eg .co.uk) but not so good if you’re using a non-geographic domain (.com, .net, .org, etc.) as many people do these days because then they will assume that your target market is the country in which your site is hosted. For example, if you own a holiday property in England and rent it mainly to the English then your target market is the UK. However, if you have a .com hosted in America you may not even appear in searches done by people in the UK using google.com or google.co.uk.

It’s not always obvious where your hosting service actually is as many are rebranded. The easiest way to find out is to go to www.whois.sc/yourdomain.com and scroll down to “IP Location”.

What if it’s in the wrong place? Surely it won’t matter that much?

Well, when we moved our sites from American hosting to UK hosting the traffic went up THIRTY fold so, yes, it does matter quite a lot.