A simple example to best understand why Geo Targeting is so important is thinking for a second about a site advertising products sold in GBP and USD in its pages; well what would be the result if a potential customer lands on a page showing a pound pricelist or a pound banner; most probably the customer would bounce off the site as he would think that this site is targeting people from the UK right?

The wisest choice for a web developer, a webmaster or a site owner is to take the time and the energy to best plan his website thinking about the end user and how he can make every single visit a converting visit as in reality if he loses a visitor (potential customer) due to a currency related issue where he did have the potential to make him a customer it is really a waste as traffic does not come for free.

The solutions offered nowadays come in two alternatives with the difference that one solution is a slightly meaner way of doing things where the other is in broad terms the correct way of doing things; nevertheless the decision to be taken is a decision based on factors including timeframe, how developed a site is and how easy it might be to adjust an existing site to best convert visitors to customers.

Site owners or webmasters can take the decision to use a sub domain in the extension of the country or the continent they are targeting which is of course the correct and the difficult way of doing things or alternatively they can select to adapt a redirect module which would pick up IP’s and seperate international traffic by directing the visitor to the section of a site which is best fit to his Geographic location.

As both alternatives have pros and cons and misusing them might be catastrophic to a websites health we would recommend you contact a Search Engine Engineer before adopting any of the two without really knowing what you are doing. It is important to note that content used on sub domains has to be unique and different from content used on the primary domain as major search engines consider subs as different sites altogether which might raise issues of duplicate content if not done the hard way.

Feel free to drop us an email with your queries; one of our consultants would be happy to discuss how you can best optimize your website the correct way in order to best target the end user and make the very most of your new and returning traffic.

The argument here is clearly the effect that this will have on visits to new sites or sites that generally rank above average. This effect introduced by Google might be helping loyal users access recently visited sites but it surely does cut off the potential for new sites that are placing an effort to rank higher. Now the argument is that the rest of the sites will again rank in order with the difference that they will rank from result 2 onwards. We are expecting to see what Google’s decision will be in either making this a bit more sophisticated or either implementing it as a feature as is. The new policy might turn out to be extremely costly to new sites with ongoing efforts to rank or to optimize their content. From Google’s point of view it surely is a way to increase revenue from sponsored links but is this; the end of Google’s fair treating? Has Google become greedy?

The bottom line is that if this beta feature does proceed with getting implemented sites will have to fight for position 2 onwards. And for users that have been zapping around a number of related sites; juice for new sites might even be starting from position 5 onwards. Further updates will be announced. If you would like to switch off customization on your browser and show results naturally click here.