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My Google rank for people searching for my website from the UK is currently 14th - which considering the last 10 years I've been ranking at 18/19/20 or lower is much better.

But For people searching from around the world - specifically the USA - I understand my rank is somewhere on page 3.

So how would I go about improving my international standing?

PS. I'm hoping my rank in the UK has more improvements to make in future updates.

EDIT

Here's some detail of what sort of things that I've done over the years to try and improve rankings:

  1. Got rid of a directory listing of about 750 noindexed demo pages which didn't have a lot of content beyond a canvas or SVG chart example and the JavaScript code that creates it. This was in August 2019. In the December 2020 Google update my site moved up to 14th position in the UK for the search that I'm targeting - "javascript charts". It still remains in a page 3 ranking for the USA.

  2. I've added an extensive About page.

  3. I used to have a forum which I removed - but since then I've re-added one. This time I'll be making sure the titles are good quality (a lot of people who post messages don't have English as their first language for example).

  4. All/most of the pages have good titles and meta descriptions.

  5. All the pages have been spell checked. When I did this the site started moving up but about 2 weeks later it was pulled back to 18/19/20 overnight. This was before I removed the demo pages. My sight isn't good so I made a lot of spelling and grammar errors!

  6. All of the pages have a set of breadcrumb links.

  7. All pages use HTTPS and gzip compression.

  8. For improved usability, the font size and the CSS line-height have been increased.

  9. I've added an FAQ to the site which also uses schema. This was a recent addition; this year.

  10. For pretty much all support requests I usually ask people if they could link to me. I usually get positive responses.

  11. The URLs of the pages used to be quite long, but I've shortened them and added 301 redirects from old to new. An example of the new URL style is: https://www.example.com/canvas/sheets.html

Which is a page about the Google Sheets connector.

  1. I frequently use online performance tools like https://www.webpagetest.org ( I just ran a test and got 5 A grades testing from the UK).

  2. I have a spider tool on my computer (Xenu spider) which I use frequently to look for 404 pages. There shouldn't be any legitimate 404 pages currently.

  3. I've tried to "flesh out" pages and make them more verbose (without adding useless crap).

  4. The footer contains links to various key pages on the site - such as the canvas and SVG sections of the website, the FAQ, the support forum, the Twitter and Facebook pages.

  5. The site has Twitter and Facebook pages which are kept up-to-date and relevant, closely mirroring what gets posted on the websites blog.

  6. The pages are quick to load and render, not using complicated HTML so they render consistently across browsers and platforms.

  7. I've added unique Twitter/Facebook meta/Og tags for each page.

  8. The site works well on mobile. No problems reported on GSC. For smaller screens the nav bar turns into a hamburger menu.

  9. Certain JavaScript libraries are positioned to enhance speed - eg charts that aren't immediately visible are created by code that's positioned at the bottom of the page.

  10. Certain HTML5 tags are used (fwiw) eg /.

  11. Summary blocks have been added to the top of each page that use the meta description.

  12. I used to change the design of the site quite often - but I no longer do this. According to the waybackmachine the last significant change to the design of the front page was between August 25th and September 15th in 2019.

There's probably more - I'm always tinkering with something - but this should give a pretty good impression I think. If there's more that you need to know then let me know.

dan
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Richard
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    For general info on getting better rankings see: What are the best ways to increase a site's position in Google? – Stephen Ostermiller Dec 28 '20 at 01:59
  • I've added some points to the question that detail some of the changes that I've made to the site. – Richard Dec 28 '20 at 11:11
  • All of those changes you listed are irrelevant as to the difference between US and UK. Where is your site hosted? – Stephen Ostermiller Dec 28 '20 at 11:45
  • It's hosted with Ionos (formerly 1and1) in the UK. Though it be a datacenter in Germany - though I think that it's the UK. – Richard Dec 28 '20 at 14:21
  • Seems that I might have neglected to mention that there's no geo-targeting setup in GSC. – Richard Dec 28 '20 at 14:26
  • We are in similar segment with a custom sql engine. Technical on page SEO is fine and helped us move from say position 30 to 10. We measure the positions using ahrefs and after establishing keywords of search intent for our products we are now using surferseo to make sure that the content includes everything people look for. Helpful was to redirect many many broken links on aws cloudfront to new locations. Feel free to contact, we are no competition. – Guido Leenders Dec 28 '20 at 20:08
  • If technical SEO helped me get to position 10 I'd be over the moon! Technical SEO is not difficult - building links is clearly what I suck at. I'm hoping that the removal of the demo pages that were light on content that helped me get to position 14 isn't finished and more improvements are to come. – Richard Dec 28 '20 at 20:58

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