Let’s pretend that you have a website or a client that operates in specific city or country like the United States for example. If you don’t live in the United States yourself how can you view the search results for Google.com? We are a Canadian based company so we have to deal with this on a regular basis. Today I want to show you a fast method that can show you geographically specific Google search results from pretty much any country in the world.
For example, if you go to Google (any geographic location, this is Google.ca for your reference) and type in ‘mountain bikes’ the results might look something like this:
But what if you want to view the results for just the United States for example?
Here’s how:
If you look at the search results URL it should look something like this:
If you want to view the search results specific to the United States, simply add this code at the end of the search results URL and hit enter:
&gl=us
So just to review:
Without Code:
With Code:
This is really helpful for viewing not only organic search results but the actual Adwords competition for specific keywords in the United States (Google Adwords competition measurement is usually way off). The results should now look something like this:
Notice how the Adwords ad’s have changed as well as the organic listings.
Another thing to note here is if you want to find other countries like the UK or Australia, you can change the country code afterwards, for example:
&gl=uk
&gl=au
For a complete country code listing visit:
http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/
Hopefully this was helpful, as always we invite you to join in the conversation. Feel free to comment or ask questions below.