Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to Target Country Specific Website Traffic?
-
I have a website with .com domain but I need to generate traffic from UK? I have already set my GEO Targeting location as UK in Google Webmasters & set country location as UK in Google Analytics as well but still, i get traffic only from India. I have also set Geo-targeting code at the backend of the website. But nothing seems works. Can anyone help me how can is do this? I am unable to understand what else can be done.
-
Hello!
There are a few parts to this answer; let's pull it apart a little.
-
Firstly, setting geographic targeting in search console is unlikely to positively impact your rankings, visibility or traffic from the UK - this tool is more to do with helping Google to understand which users should not find your website, and to help manage brand who have websites with different areas (or multiple websites) which target different countries. That said, there's no harm in enabling it, and I'd recommend that you leave it set.
-
It'd also be helpful to understand what you mean when you say that you've "set geo-targeting code at the back end of the website". Are you referring to hreflang tagging? And if so, what does your configuration look like? A partial or erroneous implementation of this can cause more problems than it solves!
I'd also double-check what your on-page language tags/attributes look like - there are a number of signals which you can send through your language markup, which might potentially help or confuse google.
-
I wonder how much of this might be a measurement issue I'd be interested to understand if you've selected the option in Google Analytics to try and filter out common bots and crawlers? It may be that much of the traffic you're seeing from India isn't human.
That rules out most of the technical and measurement challenges. The next areas I'd look are more challenging, and a bit 'bigger picture'.
-
Are you using tools like Moz, Search Console and SEMrush and others to measure how and where your website is ranking for various queries? Can you see the kinds of keywords which you're visible for, which are driving this traffic?
-
Is your content, brand, product and/or service relevant to a UK audience?
-
Does your website provide a good experience for searchers who are looking for the content you provide; and how does that quality of experience compare to other websites who serve that audience (particularly in the UK)?
-
Is your website well-constructed, managed, and generally _good _and usefu__l? Is it differentiated and distinct? Is your content well-written and helpful?
-
Do other websites, blogs, communities and social audiences link to, talk about, promote and cite your website - again, particularly in the UK?
Things I wouldn't worry about:
-
It doesn't really matter where your website is hosted. In an age when most hosting and routing infrastructure is cloud-based and international, this isn't really an issue. Where this _might _affect you is around speed and performance (hosting which is geographically far away from your visitor might mean a slower response) - I'd check with tools like Pingdom and WebPagetest to see how you're performing, and to spot ways to speed things up.
-
I'd not worry overly about directories or submission of any kind - any effort you'd spend submitting your site to these kinds of listings could be better spent on improving your content/website/service and engaging with the communities you operate in, with an aim of encouraging people to talk about, cite and engage with your brand.
I appreciate that none of these are easy, quick wins - however, hopefully they'll provide a starting point for you to think about!
Let me know if you've any follow-up thoughts or concerns, or if anything I've signposted leads to any further questions.
-
-
Thanks a lot for sharing this link. Hoping this will help.
-
Hi,
Yes you must implement what I have suggested. Second thing I would like to suggest you to ask your same question in Google webmaster forum to get more suggestion on your query.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters
Thanks
-
Hey Alick,
I agree with what you say. Shall surely try what you have suggested and then track the traffic. Also, do let me know if you come across any more solution for this problem.
-
Hi,
You are getting Organic traffic from India?
1 > if your target audience is in the U.K., try to get more backlinks from U.K.-based websites.
2>Host your website on UK servers
3>For country-based traffic, you should submit your website to local search engines and local web directories. This will eventually become a very useful tool for getting country-specific backlinks, which will become a significant factor in determining the geo-location of your traffic.
Thanks
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Check website update frequency?
Is the tools out there that can check our frequently website is updated with new content products? I'm trying to do an SEO analysis between two websites. Thanks in advance Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Website copying in Tweets from Twitter
Just noticed a web developer I work with has been copying tweets into the website - and these are displayed (and saved) one page at a time across hundreds of pages (this is so they can populate a twitter feed, I am told). How would you tackle this, now that the deed's been done? This is in Drupal. Your thoughts would be welcome as this is a new one to me. Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Duplicate content on recruitment website
Hi everyone, It seems that Panda 4.2 has hit some industries more than others. I just started working on a website, that has no manual action, but the organic traffic has dropped massively in the last few months. Their external linking profile seems to be fine, but I suspect usability issues, especially the duplication may be the reason. The website is a recruitment website in a specific industry only. However, they posts jobs for their clients, that can be very similar, and in the same time they can have 20 jobs with the same title and very similar job descriptions. The website currently have over 200 pages with potential duplicate content. Additionally, these jobs get posted on job portals, with the same content (Happens automatically through a feed). The questions here are: How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down? Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling What can be done to resolve these issues? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
Google indexed wrong pages of my website.
When I google site:www.ayurjeewan.com, after 8 pages, google shows Slider and shop pages. Which I don't want to be indexed. How can I get rid of these pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward0 -
Wrong country sites being shown in google
Hi, I am having some issues with country targeting of our sites. Just to give a brief background of our setup and web domains We use magento and have 7 connected ecommerce sites on that magento installation 1.www.tidy-books.co.uk (UK) - main site 2. www.tidy-books.com (US) - variations in copy but basically a duplicate of UK 3.www.tidy-books.it (Italy) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 4.www.tidy-books.fr (France) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 5.www.tidy-books.de (Germany) - fully translated by a native speaker - uits' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 6.www.tidy-books.com.au (Australia) - duplicate of UK 7.www.tidy-books.eu (rest of Europe) - duplicate of UK I’ve added the country and language href tags to all sites. We use cross domain canonical URLS I’ve targeted in the international targeting in Google webmaster the correct country where appropriate So we are getting number issues which are driving me crazy trying to work out why The major one is for example If you search with an Italian IP in google.it for our brand name Tidy Books the .com site is shown first then .co.uk and then all other sites followed on page 3 the correct site www.tidy-books.it The Italian site is most extreme example but the French and German site still appear below the .com site. This surely shouldn’t be the case? Again this problem happens with the co.uk and .com sites with when searching google.co.uk for our keywords the .com often comes up before the .co.uk so it seems we have are sites competing against each other which again can’t be right or good. The next problem lies in the errors we are getting on google webmaster on all sites is having no return tags in the international targeting section. Any advice or help would be very much appreciated. I’ve added some screen shots to help illustrate and happy to provide extra details. Thanks UK%20hreflang%20errors.png de%20search.png fr%20search.png it%20search.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tidybooks1 -
My website is not ranking for primary keywords in Google
I need help regarding some SEO strategy that need to be implemented to my website http://goo.gl/AiOgu1 . My website is a leading live chat product, daily it receives around 2000 unique visitors. Initially the website was impacted by manual link penalty, I cleaned up lot of backlinks, the website revoked from the penalty some where around June'14. Most of the secondary and longtail Keywords started ranking in Google, but unfortunately, it do not rank well for the primary keywords like (live chat, live chat software, helpdesk etc). Since I have done lot of onsite changes and even revamped the content but till now I dont find any improvement. I am unable to understand where I have got structed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sandeep.clickdesk
can anyone help me out?0 -
How to check a website's architecture?
Hello everyone, I am an SEO analyst - a good one - but I am weak in technical aspects. I do not know any programming and only a little HTML. I know this is a major weakness for an SEO so my first request to you all is to guide me how to learn HTML and some basic PHP programming. Secondly... about the topic of this particular question - I know that a website should have a flat architecture... but I do not know how to find out if a website's architecture is flat or not, good or bad. Please help me out on this... I would be obliged. Eagerly awaiting your responses, BEst Regards, Talha
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
GeoIP - Redirect all but target country
My client would like to redirect all non UK traffic from their UK site to their main group site. I am intending to use a .htaccess redirect, like this: RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} !^GB$
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cottamg
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.group.com$1 [R,L] I have tested the redirect at it works fine. My question is if I put this in place would it have any negative SEO impact on the UK site?0