Geographically differentiating your website from others
Whatever the purpose of your website, there are likely to be hundreds of other "competitor" websites doing the same thing. All are trying to attract the same visitors as you. For your website to be successful, you need to make it stand out from the rest. But how can you do this?
The answer is to differentiate your website from its competitors. This means that you focus the purpose of your website in such a way so that it targets a niche topic or offers some unique advantage to visitors that other websites do not.
There are many ways you could do this. One way which is often overlooked is to differentiate your website geographically.
The Internet is global. Most website owners therefore intend their site to be aimed at a world-wide audience. However, your website can often be even more successful if it is focused at a specific geographic area such as a country, state/province, city or sometimes even a suburb.
For example, if you wanted to start a travel website, it would be difficult to successfully compete with the many thousands of similar sites already on the Web. However, if you were to focus your site on travel destinations in the state/province in which you live, it is likely that there will be much fewer competitors, and your website will therefore be more successful.
If your website focuses on a specific topic, search engines will be likely to give it a higher rank in relevant search results (but of course, only when people search for information about the geographic area you are targeting). Since your site is focused on a niche topic, you can also provide more in-depth information than other websites and people could soon start to see you as an expert in the area.
A factor that needs to be taken into consideration is that if you focus your website too specifically, there might not be enough interested people to generate good site traffic. You therefore need to determine how specifically or broadly you differentiate your website from others. In some instances it might be best to go local and global, that is, design your site so that it is both appealing to a local audience as well as a global audience.
Unlike globally-focused websites, which can rely on search engines to generate traffic based on very broad search terms, geographically-focused websites might also require an ongoing public relations or marketing campaign to retain interest in your site because there are fewer people who form your "target market". Unless you have marketing or public relations experience, this might be a possible expense you need to take into consideration.
Finally, you might decide to register more than one domain name for your site: a geographic domain name based on your country (for example .us for the United States, .eu for Europe, .co.uk for the United Kingdom, .com.au for Australia .de for Germany, etc...) as well as a generic top-level domain name for global visitors (such as .com, .net, .org, .info or .biz). You could then redirect one of the domain names to the other.
