How to Show up in search engines for multiple country specific results

In my work with international clients, particularly in Europe, I am often asked what is the best strategy to ensure that a client shows up in country specific results in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN for multiple countries. For example, a client based in Germany with a .de domain may also consider Austria or Switzerland attractive markets, and they may wish to show up in the country specific results under google.de, google.at, and google.ch. Most people would tell you that you have to choose just one. However, there are a number of strategies that one might employ to break into the results for more than one of these.

For those of you that are not familiar with how country specific results work, the general rule is that to show up let's say in Google.de for Germany results only, your site either needs to be physically hosted on a German server or have a .de extension. This only allows for the site to be listed in results for one country however.

One solution to the dilemma above would be to use a country specific domain from one country but host the site on a server physically located in another. In the example above we may choose to use a .de domain while hosting the site physically on a server based in Austria. This would cover two markets, but we would still be without results for Switzerland. To solve this, one solution, although not perfect, would be to set of a sub domain and host the sub domain on a server in Switzerland. This will allow pages of the site to be listed in the country specific results for all three target countries.

You may be dealing with some additional problem here however. First, you are complicating your hosting situation. This is just a matter of management. If set up correctly this can be avoided, but it would take a competent IT team. Another potential issue would be duplicate content. You would want to have unique content at the sub domain as opposed to a duplicate of the main folder. If done correctly, in this instance, you would have all three target countries covered and your business could essentially target all three through country specific searches.