Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

INTERNATIONALIZATION

A notable influence on personalized results is regional location. Location-tailored results can be a substantial part of the relevance calculation. At a basic level, all results are personalized based on location. A searcher in the United States will get more results from U.S./English-language websites than a searcher in Italy, who will get more results from Italian websites written in Italian. In addition, certain queries have additional location-based relevance factors. For instance, someone searching for [pizza] in Seattle is likely to see Seattle-based restaurant results, and someone searching for [pizza] in Boston will likely see Boston-based restaurant results.

Regional relevance factors are particularly important to businesses that are local in nature (such as pizza restaurants) and those that serve particular countries (for example, British Telecom would like its site to be surfaced to British searches; HP would like its Spanish site to be served to Spanish searchers). These factors get trickier as the intent becomes more complicated. What about U.S. searchers who are looking for vacation accommodations in Croatia? Or a French speaker on vacation in Italy who is looking for information about trains in Poland? And how should businesses target the European Union? Or how should a business target researchers in Mexico, rather than in Spain, with Spanish content?

Internationalization for search acquisition is beyond the scope of this book, but check marketingintheageofgoogle.com ...