What does it take to crack the US market?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Brad Sacks: We are optimizing for a Canadian home goods company with .ca and .com e-commerce platforms. We are ranking really well on Google.com and Google.ca but Canadian sales are much higher than US sales (US sales are practically non-existent). What does it take to crack the US market? What do you think may be the cause of this? Do you think it's:
  
  1) Website Layout
  2) Content
  3) US Market
  
  Thoughts?
• 
  Lightship Digital: Ranking equally well for the same keywords? especially the ones which are sending visitors who convert at your Canadian store?
  
  It can be the trust factor, since it is a Canadian company?
• 
  Brian Swanick: I've had experience between US/CA/MX markets, and the US market was much deeper than the other two. Despite the US site having more content, better content, and about a 2 year head start, it was impossible to crack the top 10 for head terms--however it was an extremely competitive vertical. However, CA organic still didn't match US for volume.
  
  Things to think about:
  * Are my sites optimized for international traffic? Meaning, are US visitors coming to the US site and CA coming to the CA site. Analytics can tell you that. If that's an issue, then look into hreflang and some international SEO tactics.
  * How many legitimate competitors are there in each market? How well are they marketing themselves digitally? Look at some high level traffic metrics from SEMRush or some Domain Authority metrics to get a high-level view.
  * What terms bring me traffic in the CA market as opposed to the US market? Find this in Google Webmaster Tools--and make sure you have this enabled for both sites. You can also check if hreflang is enabled here.
  * Are my sites optimized from an on-site perspective? Meaning, is the CA site different from the US site? Or is the US site an exact copy with little off-page optimization? Extra question: does the US site have french language on it? ;
  
  I hope that helps!
• 
  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 01:18:50 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/what_does_it_take_to_crack_the_us_market +Brad Sacks
  
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