In online marketing geo-targeting is the process of delivering content to visitors to your website, or readers of your ads, that is specifically tailored to their location. That might be a country location, a state or province location, or even a city or town location. And in the global online marketplace, for almost all businesses, geotargeting is essential to optimising your conversions and sales.
The simple example would be a retail website that sells shoes. Customers in different countries will have different expectations for the sizes of the shoes (UK / US / European) and the currency they pay in. Through geo-targeting a retailer can present the correct range of sizes and the price in GBP to UK visitors, US Dollars to US visitors and Euros to European visitors. They can also change the language on the page for the country the visitor is from.
How Does Geo-Targeting Work?
There a few different strands to geotargeting and we will cover each here. It can be done on a very simple level where a few words of content are substituted depending on the country the user is from, or on a much bigger scale where an entire new website is created for each country and indicators are set to tell Google which version of the website is built for each geographical location.
Using Word Press Plug-Ins For Geo-Targeting
Perhaps the simplest way to geo-target your website is use a plug in. There are a few options here that you can easily install through your WP admin screens. These usually work by using IP of GPS to determine the location of a visitor to your site and returning the correct content based on this information.
Like most plug ins, geo-targeting ones have been built in such a way as to make using them easy even if you are not a genius developer. Most, like GeotargetingWP, allow you to target pretty much any piece of content, from whole posts to snippets of content, navigation items and even affiliate links which can be swapped in and out depending on location. The latter is key for affiliate marketeers expanding their reach to multiple territories and looking to push users to different versions of a partner website dependent on visitor origin.
As an example, a casino affiliate site is targeting readers in Canada through a .ca domain. But different Canadian provinces have different license conditions. So, the same partner casino will require the affiliate to use separate tracking links for users in Ontario to the rest of Canada. Using a plug in, the affiliate can simply swap in the Ontario tracker when a user is found by IP or GPS to be located in that Province.
Word Press Plug Ins are a great way for you to tweak content on your site for different countries, states or cities. But there are other considerations for online marketeers. Namely, how does Google understand your site and present the right version of your page, or domain, in its results pages?
For this, there are a few options each of which requires significantly more investment of time and money than simply using a plug in.
Country Code TLDs
One way to ensure that Google lists the correct version of your site in its listings is to use Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs). These are TLDs like .ca for Canada, .in for India and .es for Spain. A good example of a site using ccTLDs is Amazon which has built Amazon.co.uk for the UK, Amazon.es for Spain and Amazon.com for the US (and many more).
Using ccTLDs indicates to Google which country you are targeting with your domain as well as creating added credibility with your users who will recognise that you are a local service too.
The significant disadvantage for the website owner, particularly if you are a small business, is that this approach requires you to build and maintain entirely different websites with their own content and link profiles. An expensive business for sure!
Sub Domains
Another option for geo-targeting your website is using subdomains. For example, you could have uk.mybusiness.com and es.mybusiness.com. This is another good indicator to Google, but once again it requires you to build a new website for the new territory. Nor is the authority of the main domain shared with the sub-domain, so it requires you to invest in further SEO outreach marketing too.
Sub Directories and Search Console
Perhaps the most popular way to geo-target your website to your users and simultaneously indicate to Google which pages are for users from each territory, is by using sub-directories and Search Console settings.
The methodology is fairly straight forward. You build sub-folders for each country. For example, mybusiness.com/uk/ for the UK and mybusiness.com/es/ for Spain. Then fill each sub folder with the pages required for each country in the correct language. Once your site is ready you need to use a combination of href lang tags in your website code and country targeting settings in Search Console to indicate to Google which versions of your pages are relevant for each country.
You can read more about that here.
So, Which Is The Best Approach?
The debate around which approach to geo-targeting a website has been running for a long time but it seems that opinion has generally settled around the following conclusion.
You should choose the country code TLD approach if you can afford it. Otherwise, use sub directories or a word press plug in to present the correct information to your users. The reasoning is that a ccTLD approach is very expensive – it requires full investment in content and marketing for multiple domains whereas a subdirectory approach or even a WP plug in approach, allows you to leverage the authority of an existing domain, and your SEO marketing spend to date, to get rankings in more territories.