Missing Market with USA Company on Canadian Server?
Our company is licensed and based in the USA. We sell 99% to USA consumers. Our host server is in Canada*.
I installed a program to monitor phishing and it displayed the Canadian flag! We're not Canadian in any way - just the host server is. If the average consumer sees the colorful Canadian flag, they would, indeed, think that my company is in Canada.
I wonder how many people I lost due to that erroneous data.
Do search engines are trying to serve up geographic search engine results - that is if I'm in Miami, then the SE's try to serve up results from Miami>FL>USA?
My brother across the company gets connected to a different Google SE server than I do for searches. Earlier this year, he reported that the search, "site:www.mysite.com", at Google returned well over 200 pages. I had only about 10 supplemental pages returned. We did our searches at the same time over a few days.
(1) Do SE's, and which ones, actually serve up organic results based on geography?
(2) What do the SE's use to determine the website company's location?
(3) Am I missing organic traffic in the USA using a server based in Canada?
(4) If what I outlined about SE's using server location to represent the website company location is correct, is there any way around this without moving the websites?
Your thoughts?
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*We use a Canadian host because of the lower cost and increase in functions available. I've searched high and low for comparable services in the USA and none come close.
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