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I live in Luxembourg so my business website should target Luxembourg but also regions of France which are near to Luxembourg.

My website is hosted on servers located in Paris, France - mostly because there is no good hosting offers in Luxembourg.

For the last few months I've been working hard on SEO in order to improve my ranking for specific keywords. My ranking has improved a lot and I have reached position 18 on on google.fr.

However, for the same set of keywords, I'm still at position 70 on google.lu.

Funnily, these keywords include 'Luxembourg', so I'd expect google.lu to give better results.

In Google Webmaster Tools, I've noticed that I can set a target country. I've left that value blank because I don't want to influence results for either countries. Do you think I should set it to Luxembourg? Would that have a negative impact on my SEO performance for google.fr?

What would you suggest for improving my score on google.lu?

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    What ccTLD are you using? Google loads different Google sites based upon language, interest, and past performance and so while one site will perform well in google.fr, it might not perform as well in google.lu. I am not sure that applies here. I just wanted inform you of that fact. It may be that there should be no/little difference. But knowing the ccTLD may really help to formulate an answer.
    – closetnoc
    Nov 5, 2014 at 16:10
  • Yes sorry I forgot to mention it ! It is .com . And the language is the same in both countries, French.
    – Sam
    Nov 5, 2014 at 16:13
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    Okay. .Com should be generally okay. If you are using location mark-up this may effect search impressions. Since the language is the same, that is not a consideration. For some locations, various TLDs will get less impressions based upon cultural differences. For example, some locales prefer sites with ccTLD over others. In addition, some locales remain local when shopping or looking for services. Language, locale preferences, past usage history, and culture are the key factors that I am aware of. Keep in mind sometimes there are subtle changes in language usage one locale to the next.
    – closetnoc
    Nov 5, 2014 at 17:01
  • Is your site in French, or do you have seperate pages for people from Luxembourg? If you have seperate pages, you could use the hreflang tag.
    – Ivo van der Veeken
    Nov 6, 2014 at 8:22
  • Unfortunately I do not have separate pages. Both countries use the same language.
    – Sam
    Nov 6, 2014 at 8:23

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Google will customize search results according to a number of different factors. This means that different users will see different results. These factors include, but are not limited to:

  • Your search term (obviously).
  • Previously-visited websites.
  • Country (local search). i.e. Somebody searching for "football" in America will receive a different result than somebody that is searching for "football" in the UK. The former will receive listings related to American Football, whereas the latter will receive results relating to soccer.
  • Language (typically set in the user agent of your browser).
  • Device: Results for mobile will often be different than the results that you get via desktop.

Do you think I should set it to Luxembourg ?

If your target country is Luxembourg, then you should set it as your target country in Webmaster Tools (especially seeing as your domain is .com). Otherwise, you will have to wait until Google automatically figures out what country your site is targeted at (they do this in a number of ways. i.e. what websites are linking to you the most and where are they based).

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  • thank you. I actually use SEO Soft (for what it's worth...) and obviously it does not take into account things like history, device, etc... but I think it's a good indicator nevertheless. The problem in setting target country as Luxembourg is that France is also my target country, so that may have a negative impact on search results given by google.fr, wouldn't it ?
    – Sam
    Nov 5, 2014 at 21:44

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