Running an international online business with the capability to service people from any country means that you want your site to perform well not only in local country specific results but also global results. You may not realise this but doing a standard Google search and leaving the “full web” option selected doesn’t necessarily give you your website’s true location in the Google global results. It gives you the global results given your location.
For example, the results of doing a full web search in my home city of Brisbane Australia will be different to a full web search from Toronto Canada.
Google gives results based on your location even when you are not stipulating a local result. You can click your local country only result button and get sites that are from your home country, usually determined by the domain name extension, for example .com.au for Australia, .ca for Canada, etc. or the IP address of your web hosting server, or you can click the web option and get global Internet results that vary depending on your computer’s location in the world (based on the IP address of the computer you are using to access the Internet).
Think Global
If your business can service the world then you really can’t ignore the American marketplace, or if you are in the USA don’t forget about Europe, Asia and the rest. Hence you need to know how well your site is performing in Google global search results and unfortunately simply ticking the “the web” option in Google when searching can be misleading because your ranking will be different if it was someone in a different country doing the exact same search.
What you want to know is when someone in the the UK does a Google search for one of your terms, how high is your website up in the search results? With this little trick you can figure it out.
The Code
All you need to do is add &gl=uk to the URL at the end of the Google search query.
For example:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sample+query&meta=&gl=uk
This tells Google to spit out the results for the query based on UK servers.
I can’t guarantee 100% conclusively that this works as I expect it does, but it definitely does something and you should try it yourself and see if your site shows up in a different place in the results. The “gl” stands for Geographic Location and of course you can interchange the last letters to test different country results around the world.