Ireland is a small country with a small population. The market is quite limited; therefore many Irish companies are forced to sell their goods and services abroad. Even in these recessionary times you hear about the booming export sector in Ireland. In fact, the Central Bank is crediting the export sector for helping us beat the recession.
There is a market out there for Irish goods. With the ever weakening Euro it makes sense for other countries to begin purchasing from Ireland. The question is – what is the best way to market your good and services abroad? Undoubtedly, advertising mediums such as TV, print, radio etc will work positively for your business. However the most effective and cheapest way to market your business is online.
Exporting to the UK
The UK population is around 15 times bigger than the Irish population. This represents a huge market right on our door step. The Pound has been traditionally stronger than the Euro. This means that people from the UK have more spending power and purchasing Irish goods starts to make sense providing that the Irish goods or services you sell are competitively priced.
Having an Internet based business allows you to keep control of your costs. It makes targeting the UK a low risk, high reward venture. Setting up and marketing a website for the UK market can cost you just a few thousand Euros. This is a miniscule investment amount compared to the ROI experienced by successful companies. Below I start to look at look at the best ways to target the UK search rankings.
How to best target the UK search rankings
There are many different Internet strategies that can be undertaken to get your business in front of eyeballs in the UK. High search engine ranking for your website is one of those ways. The UK search engine optimisation scene is far more competitive than it is in Ireland. More investment is needed in SEO in order to achieve similar results to what your website achieves in Ireland. Therefore, you need every advantage that you can take. Local search is highly important with search engines. People in the UK tend to search on Google.co.uk, just like people in Ireland search on Google.ie. These local search engines give priority to websites with TLDs for that country. This does not mean that your .ie or .com site cannot rank highly on search results. It is just hindered by the geographic association of its TLD.
Most Irish companies will have a .ie Top Level Domain. This is not very suitable for the UK market. And it will find it hard to be successful in UK ranking results. The best and most successful geo-targeting strategy would be to develop a specific UK based website with a .co.uk top level domain.
This new website will need to be localised to the UK market. It will need to contain the correct currencies and it should mention UK based addresses where possible. If you have a .ie and .co.uk site then you should tweak the content slightly between the two. Try and use the terms UK and Ireland where suitable on both. Another geo location factor you must consider is hosting. If feasible, look into hosting your site on a UK based server. Your linking strategy should concentrate on securing links from UK based companies where possible. With these geo location strategies we are always striving to increase our relevancy to the UK search results. The more our site seems like it is UK based, the higher it will rank in local Google.co.uk search results. If your website ticks all the above boxes then your business should become highly visible in UK search results and this will make you money. Your business will become part of the Irish export led recovery solution.
I will be discussing this topic in far more detail in future posts so keep an eye out.
