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Optimization is the name of the game right? Optimize your site so the search engines and consumers can find you. Well it’s not as simple as that. Optimizing based on how (not what) people search is just as important.

Last week, I got a panicked call from a client letting me know that they suddenly didn’t appear within the natural results of Google anymore when searching for a specific term that we had worked our optimization butts off on to improve.

My first reaction was to immediately doublecheck this. To my surprise – they did appear. Classic he-said, she-said..Right? Wrong…

We were both right. It was all in how we were searching. What most of us don’t know or realize is that the toolbars within your browser (for example Google), are automatically set to provide you (a Canadian) with US results if you happen to use that for your search queries. While the search engine usually redirects or sets you the Canadian results, the toolbar applications themselves don’t automatically do this.

Don’t believe me? Try it, think of a service that is available worldwide, then think of a specific Canadian company you would hope to find. Pick a term you would associate with their product or service and try searching both ways. See?

The real question of course then becomes how many people (Canadians) use this? Well the real stats do not seem to anywhere to be found, but I’ve heard rumours that about 20% of Canadians search this way.

Don’t panic yet – there are several ways to fix this:
1. Change your Toolbar Setting.
Not so easy to figure out, but easy enough to do once you have the instructions and actually know this.

2. Use Canada as part of your keywords search query string.
Again, easy to say, but you try telling all the consumers out there to follow this practice. Besides, you actually get a different set of results when you do that as you’ve now added a new term.

3. Make sure you’re running Paid ads on those keywords you so desperately want to do well on organically.
From a paid perspective your ads typically are or can be set up to be targeted to Canadian only ips. So even if your searcher is using the toolbar – they will still see your paid search ads.

This specific example now seems to give a leg up to the folks who argue so vehemently for ensuring you continue bidding on keywords that you’ve optimized organically for. I had always seen both points of view before and not really aligned myself either way. Knowing what I know now, I definitely agree with the “do both” camp – especially for Canadians – or any other international marketers for that matter.