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 expects the economy to exit the recession due by growth in the export sector.
Foreign countries are interested in purchasing Irish goods. The Euro has been weakening a lot in recent months and this makes Irish exports even more desirable. But how do you get your company noticed abroad? Many companies use print, tv, radio, trade show etc to market their goods. These can be expensive and in my view the most cost effective way to advertise is through Internet marketing.
The population of the United Kingdom is over 15 times greater than that of Ireland. This is a significant market and it is only a few miles off the Irish coast. The GB Pound is stronger than the Euro and this means that Irish goods and services are cheap for the UK to buy. If your company has a competitively priced product or service then it could work in the UK. The Internet allows you to keep your cost under control. It is much cheaper than buying an offline presence. This makes targeting the UK a high reward, low risk strategy. For a small initial investment you can realise a huge return on your investment. I detail how to best approach the UK market from an Internet marketing point of view below.
There are a wide range of geotargeting strategies available when targeting the UK. I am not going to detail all of them here, but I will focus on what I consider to be the most successful tactic for getting your site noticed on search engines in the UK. The Irish search marketing scene is not highly competitive at the moment. This is the opposite of the situation in the UK. Getting visibility for your website on local search engines like Google.co.uk takes more time and investment but the rewards are greater. When it comes to geo-targeting this region you need to take advantage of all the ranking factors associated with geo-targeting. The vast majority of Internet users in the UK use local search engines e.g. Google.co.uk. These search engines take geographic indicators into account. Websites with the country domain name .co.uk will appear higher than .coms or .ie provided all other factors are similar.
Most Irish companies have .ie top level domains. These work well on Irish search results but it counts against your website when targeting the UK search results. You need to take advantage of the .co.uk TLD geo-targeting factor. The best strategy to pursue would be to develop a separate UK version of your website with a .co.uk TLD.
Creating a UK version of your website is not enough. This website will need to be localised to the UK market. Use UK place names, addresses, currencies, spellings etc. To avoid any duplicate content issues you should tweak the content on your UK site so it is not a mirror image of the Irish site. Make sure that the majority of your inbound links are from websites in the UK. Host your new UK site on UK servers if possible. By adhering to these simple tactics we are ensuring that search engines view our new UK website as being relevant to UK Internet users. If your new website starts gaining visibility in the UK local searches then this will make you a lot of money. You will be part of the export led Irish economic recovery.
If you are looking for an SEO agency in Ireland to spearhead your attack on the UK market then get in touch with JumpStart Marketing
