American sites might look good but be wary if your customers are in Europe
One of the relatively little known aspects of how search engines work is that they use the location of your hosting as a key part of determining how high your site will appear on the search results. The differences can be particularly striking if you’re marketing a vacation or holiday property.
Now, most people will know where their own site is listed (you can check by going to www.whois.sc/yourdomain.com and scrolling down to IP location) but what they’re much less likely to know is where a site they’re advertising is listed on. The greater number of Americans usually means that there are more American based vacation listings sites around and, of course, the majority of these are hosted in America.
OK, so you’ll probably know if it’s talking about 1-800 numbers and vacations rather than 0800 numbers and holidays that it’s an American site but many sites are global in scope and will talk about both vacations and holidays with the effect that it’s often not clear which side of the Atlantic they’ve been written. However, even aside from that, the lower cost of hosting in America means that many holiday accommodation listings sites are hosted there even if they are run from the UK or Australia (the cheapest American host is $1/month, the cheapest British one is around $4/month).
So what? Well, when we moved our own listings sites from America to the UK, the traffic and booking enquiries that we produced for those listing with us went up around THIRTY fold. Therefore, if your main customer base is in Europe a comparable European hosted listing will be worth, say, ten times what it’s American counterpart is in terms of bookings that it will provide you. Naturally, the reverse applies too although the greater amount of vacation time that Europeans get means that European vacation listings are usually more effective than comparable American ones.
To be fair, if you aim squarely at listing with only European based sites, then clearly you’ll not get as many Americans as you would otherwise. If you want guests from America too then you’re either going to need to list with an American based listings site or with one like OurInns which hosts in Europe and America.
Finally, don’t forget that Americans usually only get 2 weeks vacation time each year vs the typical 5 or 6 weeks in the UK so although there are around four times the number of Americans as British, the number of each should that you get should, all things being equal, be roughly the same. In practice, it rarely is equal, of course, as clearly it costs more for Americans to travel to Europe and vice versa.
Popularity: 64% [?]
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Copyright © 2008 by Arnold Stewart. All rights reserved.