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GeoTargeting with SEO

Guest post by: Aftab Siddiqui

Article Overview: GeoTargeting is very important for online local businesses. Small local businesses operating within a particular region need only local traffic. I have discussed in this article the modern techniques which SEO gurus use for GeoTargeting. Using these techniques online local businesses can get on top of Google for targeted keywords.

GeoTargeting with SEO

Geo Targeting is getting more important for local businesses running online. Local Online Businesses operating within a particular region, city, county, state or even country don’t need global traffic. For example a Pizza Shop delivering Pizza only with in Karachi city don’t need traffic from UK or US.

If you are running PPC Campaign on Goggle (AdWords) or Bing (AdCenter), it is very easy to show your ads. to visitors located in a particular region and receive only GeoTargeted Traffic. Some Web Masters use other techniques to block unwanted visitors by tracking location of their visitors. One of my clients operating business worldwide but focusing visitors from Caribbean and Africa needed not to show some of his products in countries outside these regions. I proposed him an IP/ Geo Location system using IP2Location Database to show/ hide content in a particular region.

When it comes to small local businesses, they don’t have huge budget to go for PPC campaigns or implement IP tracking system. They usually have shared hosting with limited bandwidth and can’t afford unwanted traffic. They heavily rely on SEO, free traffic from Search Engines. It is very important for SEO doing optimization on such web sites to know how to target local traffic. Very few SEO know how to tell Google that a particular web site is for a particular region/ city/ country only.

There are four very simple techniques which may be used in order to target local visitors. These are proven techniques which I have used on some of my clients’ web sites.

1. Register a local domain: If your client has not yet registered a domain, advise him to buy a local domain. For example, for a local UK business go for “.co.uk” or other local domain. This will help telling search engines that this is a local UK web site and your web site will be placed higher on Google.co.uk, uk.yahoo.com and bing.com/?cc=gb, provided that it is optimized correctly. This will definitely help attracting local UK visitors.
2. Use Geolocation targeted keywords: For your SEO, use GeoLocation targeted keywords. For example if your web site is an online furniture shop delivering its furniture only with in UK, then you may use keywords like “Online Furniture Shop UK”, “Garden furniture UK” or even “Living Furniture London”. These keywords will help generating local UK traffic through search engines.
3. Geographic Targeting in Google WebMaster Tools: As we all know that Google is the No. 1 search engine and almost all the SEOs focus their optimization on Google. Google drives over 60% of the total Search traffic and it is worth to focus your SEO efforts on Google for maximum search traffic. As far as GeoTargeting is concerned, you can tell Google about the GeoLocation of your web site even if you don’t have local domain. This can be done using Google WebMaster Tools. If you have not yet registered your web site with Google WebMaster Tools, do it now. Go to:
   
   Google WebMaster Tools
   
   Once registered, Add your web site using “Add a Site” Button and verify it. After verification, your web site will appear on your Web Master Tools Panel. Click on your website to go to dashboard. Once you are on dashboard, click “Site Configuration  Setting”, you will be taken to “Setting” where you can set “Geographic Target” by selecting your country from the list of countries. This will tell Google that your site is local web site. This is a proven technique and I have used this for one of my clients having “.com” domain but has local business in Zimbabwe. I set the Geographic Location from Google Web Master Tools and optimized his web site for general keywords which were highly competitive. After certain time the site stared to show up on 1st page of Google.co.zw for all its main keywords. These keywords were nowhere on Google.com or other local versions of Google.
4. Local Web Hosting: Hosting your web site on local web server may be helpful in getting top ranking in local search results and driving GeoTargeted traffic. If you are a local UK business, it is advisable to have your web site hosted on local UK web server.

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Article Tags: GeoTargeting, SEO Techniques, SEO Tools



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