Targeting a different geographical area with SEO?

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Professor Data

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What is the general consensus on targeting a specific country, other than where you live, using SEO? Can this be done with similar success to if you target your own local area?

I live in Canada but am thinking of focusing on US customers for two reasons:

1) I'll be traveling a certain amount anyway and will not necessarily be tied to Canada year-round. As long as my customers speak English, it doesn't matter to me where they are located. I could be in Europe for a few months and it wouldn't matter.

2) the exchange rate is currently $1.00 USD = $1.31 CAD, so I can be 30% more price competitive in the US market.

My TLD is ".com" (not ".ca"), I've got an online business model that doesn't require me to be physically close to customers and my host's nearest data center is in Chicago. How much of a negative impact, if any, would Canada being my home country have on my attempts to rank in US search results?
 
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If you're targeting a specific country, and other domains in the country are using country extensions, then it's best to do the same.

There are SOME preferences in Google's eyes, like the FR, DK, .co.uk, domain extensions where there's definitely a preference given in Search, but it still just comes down to content and marketing in the pages itself.

I've seen quite a few companies in the Vancouver area that use .com domains and market to the US without any issue. It seems Canadian businesses are forgiving of the .com extension - however, people in the US nearly automatically discount the site if it's using .ca.

It's all psychology at that point.
 
How about a proofreading business (English only) that aims to service multiple foreign markets? I'm especially interested in helping people for whom English isn't their first language (India, China etc.)

Is it possible for a business to rank in multiple foreign markets on Google or does the algorithm pretty much force you to focus on only one geographical area in order to be successful?
 
Definitely possible to rank in multiple markets, just requires twice as much work.

If you're targeting people who are not English first language, then you're likely going to be writing a few pages in their native language. As a result, you'll have multiple pages all saying the same thing. Be sure to look into Canonical URL so that you can assign the source of the page and also define the language in the page. This will help keep your pages in the search engine results pages.

You'll want to determine if you're going to configure the website with subdomains (in.domain.com, cn.domain.com, fr.domain.com) or directories (domain.com/en/, domain.com/fr/, domain.com/de/)

Once you've figured that out (and there's no real right or wrong way to do it), you'll be able to block off sections of the site so that only Google.de accesses certain pages.

An alternative is to use the Google Language translator which a user can then use a dropdown to change the language on the page, but this is machine language and not spoken language, so you run a high risk of it not being grammatically correct or readable. As such, individually written and targeted pages are better.
 
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