Posted on 09. Apr, 2010
Well this in reality is a question nowadays asked by site owners quite often and the answer is yes it is! As major search engines like Google have enabled webmasters and site owners to set a geographic location for the various divisions or sections on their websites it is in reality a pity to not take the time and set a website’s settings to target the geographic location to which your audience and your possible customers come from.
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.
