A while ago I heard a story of a woman who got a little suspicious when the surroundings seemed a bit unfamiliar after arriving to her destination. So she asked the taxi driver if “this really is San Juan, Puerto Rico?“. “No ma´m“, he replied. “You´re in San José, Costa Rica“…
A simple mistake by her travel agency. They booked a flight to SJO (San Jose) instead of SJA (San Juan) and ruined her vacation. Did you know a quite similar story can happen to your tourism website? It´s your choice, where to upload it.
It´s understandable that tourism companies are looking for a cheap web host for their site. The net is overcrowded of them and it doesn´t matter where the site is hosted anyway, people don´t really care about such things. Or do they?
Well, Google do. They know exactly where your website is stored AND from where in the world people are searching for it. Then they present the results location based, meaning that a potential client of your tours gets results from companies nearby themselves, on top.
So if you have a tourism.com company operating in -say- Sweden, and your (Swedish) website is stored on a server in The United States of America, your potential Swedish customers won´t find you on any of the first pages of Google results. At least not if your running your site under a top level domain name (.com, .org etc). There are a number of complicated algorithms search engines use for page rankings, which you can dive deep into on the net, but knowing that the web server location is important for search results is easy to remember.
However, if you´re operating under a national domain (.se for Sweden or .fr for France etc) Google acknowledges this as a more important factor than the actual location of the server. So if you´re targeting customers in a specific country, use their country code for better search rank and preferrably host your website on a server in the same country. Or you can set the geo targeting preferences and choose target countries with google webmaster tools.
You don´t want your business to end up in the wrong destination, do you?
A great reminder to plan for the worst and hope for the best – thanks for sharing! Also would add that Google seems to be ever-increasing the influence of “local” in their search, so it’s important to monitor your rankings and adjust as necessary.