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
-
How to integrate two websites, post-merger?
One of my clients has just been bought by a much larger company and thus will be losing their website and brand name. My client's site has built up a lot of traffic and authority in its space, so we are very nervous about losing all of this after the sale has gone through. The purchasing company intends for my client's services to be represented on its own website, so I am wondering, from a technical standpoint, what the best way is of going ahead with this, since my client will continue to work with the new company and would like to keep us onboard. Should we doing an 80/20 analysis, recreate our most valuable pages (eg. 70%+ of traffic is to home page) on the new site, then 301 each of these pages individually to its equivalent on the new site, while retaining as much of the old pages' on-page content/structure as possible? One thing I am concerned about is the fact that a large chunk of traffic is from brand searches. Again, should we simply recreate the home page with a page title of e.g. "X company is now part of Y company" in order that we'll still rank highly for the old company's brand name? Any advice on how to go about this is much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg0 -
How do I get the sub-domain traffic to count as sub-directory traffic without moving off of WordPress?
I want as much traffic as possible to my main site, but right now my blog lives on a blog.brand.com URL rather than brand.com/blog. What are some good solutions for getting that traffic to count as traffic to my main site if my blog is hosted on WordPress? Can I just create a sub-directory page and add a rel canonical to the blog post?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | johnnybgunn0 -
URL rewrite traffic drop
Hello, A while ago (Sep. 19 2013) we had a new url structure upgrade for products pages within our website (with all the needed 301 redirects in place,internal links & sitemaps updates), but our new urls lost the serps of the old ones and with that we experienced a big traffic drop (and since September I can't see any sign of recovery).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silviu
Here are just 3 examples of old and coresponding new urls: http://www.nobelcom.com/phone-cards/calling-Mexico-from-United-States-1-182.html
http://www.nobelcom.com/Mexico-phone-cards-182.html http://www.nobelcom.com/es/phone-cards/calling-Mexico-from-United-States-1-182.html
http://www.nobelcom.com/es/Mexico-tarjetas-telefonicas-182.html http://www.nobelcom.com/phone-cards/calling-Angola-Cell-from-Canada-55-407.html
http://www.nobelcom.com/Angola-Cell-phone-cards/from-Canada-55-407.html We followed every seo/usability rule and have no clue why this happened. Any ideea? Cheers,
S.0 -
Traffic by Country: Is It Possible to Change it?
Let's say you have a .ng domain but you receive more traffic from USA than from Nigeria. Let's say you want traffic only from Nigeria. How do you correct this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YESdesign0 -
Website having same business and IP address
Hi All, How Google will react with the websites having condition as mentioned below: Two websites, Same owner, same business, same IP, Interlinking with each other ? Two websites, Same owner, same business, different IP, Interlinking with each other ? Also please elaborate best practices(Such as IP address, Physical address, look and feel etc.) if someone wants to run same business through more than one website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
DNS or 301 Website Redirect
We are running a marketplace site, so we have thousands of vendors selling their products on our site. Each vendor has a Profile page and we are soon to launch a premium store-front that is white label. Many of these vendors will want to point a custom url to their premium store-front (which is a sub domain of the marketplace) and we are trying to get an understanding of how we should instruct them to point their url in a way that will give the main marketplace site the seo juice. We also want to understand what will show up in the address bar. Will it be their url or our sub domain? Will any of the marketplace seo juice boost their url local listing status?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bloomnation0 -
SIte Redesign - Disaster for Organic Traffic
A client just redesigned their site and launched it around May 30. The organic traffic has had a MAJOR drop and has not returned yet. All of the old pages have been 301 redirected to the new pages. Any thoughts on what could be causing this to www.brickhousesecurity.com? In Google Webmaster Tools, before the redesign we were receiving about 300,000 impressions and 10-12,000 clicks. Now the impressions are only 100,000 with half as many clicks. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Redirecting my new Website URL to my old Website URL
Hi! OK, I am semi - new to SEO Moz but have been self-teaching for 3 years. However I am stuck.. I have been operating my e-commerce site from www.shopadornonline.com for the past 3 years. I just purchased www.shopadorn.com Right now Shopadorn.com re-directs to www.shopadornonline.com because all my products and links go to shopadornonline.com/productblahblahblah I guess I am stuck. Not sure what to tell my web designer to do? Do I give up on having shopadorn.com OR do I start re-directing customers and doing 301 re-directs? I think from what i have read that it is bad to have traffic going to both shopadorn and shopadornonline as they compete for rankings? Where should I start?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shopadorn0