I have been working for a client in Germany trying to attract business from the states.

I have servers in Germany and in the states. If I search using the same search engine from Germany or VPN in to one of my US servers and change my time zone, I get two totally different results. This works in both directions mysite.de (location Germany) or mysite.com (location Seattle USA). The Server location and the searcher location both seem to play a roll in the results. Servers are cheep I would suggest putting up multiple copies of the web site in each of your target markets and link them to the main project, especially if you are international.