Work Geo-Targetting Magic on Your Website

Hey everyone, back after a few weeks away!

I was just going over a few of my updates, when I noticed my geo targetting experiment had yielded many results, some of which were very confusing, but in the whole equation, Geo targetting worked magic towards my website, namely increasing my traffic levels 3 fold, increasing conversions and having a better outlook.

Ok, geo-targetting is first a process of getting your website to rank in a search engine that is designed to return results within that area, i.e. Google.fr is regional because it returns french websites.

Geo targetting is not a common subject but I feel it needs examining and implementing, because you can cut out the crap of spammers, you can better tailor your website to your visitors and you can get results from conversions.

First of all, you need to review your audience, if you are trying to target everywhere and everything, then you do not need to worry about geo-targetting, but if you are trying to just grab traffic from a particular country, then bingo, this is how.

Google uses a series of information to determine your websites audience, first of all, the main factors to consider are, hosts ip address, your top level domain extension, your whois information, and the language used on your website.

You can actually specify your geo target using the Geo Targetting in Googles webmaster central tool.

Those who own multiple domains however, can utilise geotargetting using the following steps,

Reverse Proxy (Adds another step before your site is returned)
A Reverse proxy will allow your website to return an ip address of another host, which can be useful if you are trying to target a region that you do not have hosting in,

You have to remember that reverse proxy adds another step into your website request, so make sure the proxy is a stable one, or you may face website downtime or excessive bandwidth usage!

Reverse proxy would be ideal for a .com website trying to rank in Google.co.uk where the hosting is done in the USA/Canada or Europe.

Use a Registrar thats based in the Geo Region
This is not of an immediate priority, but has been a factor within determining the geo region. The registrar will issue the information through a worldwide registry such as nominet, but the information published will usually include the origin of the provider.

Use of Language
Using a foreign language frequently in the body text will be detected by Google, although this will not directly affect the sites geo region, it will instead cause a loss of rankings. This is only the case for foreign websites such as websites using a different language to the search specific results of the search engine in a different region.

Don't expect a .co.uk website using french text to have an increase priority in a .fr search engine!

Likewise, even the seperation between American English and UK English is detectable, however these factors are hard to differentiate between.


BE CAREFUL!
When using Googles geo targeting option, any other domains that you have that use different top level domains, i.e. .com, .co.uk, .ie, .fr .de etc. Will suffer as a result in most scenarios as you are focusing the actual website on a specific region.

Thanks for the article. I hadn't thought about Reverse Proxies before!