How to optimise your website to target different geographic locations
How to optimise your website to target different geographic locations
There are literally so many strategies you can apply when it comes to setting-up geo targeting and targeting your products or services to many different locations using the same or different web addresses. This approach to marketing has become increasingly popular over the last few years and correlates with an upsurge in internet usage across the world. This article will go into more depth about how to use your website to target different geographic locations and the certain things yo9u can do to make sure you appear at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages across many different local search engines e.g. Google.fr or Google.de.
One of the first things you may want to consider is purchasing a localised domain e.g. a .de domain or a .fr domain. It's no secret that Google prefers to present local results over more globalised results, and if your website has a country code top level domain then the odds are that it will stand to benefit in terms of how it ranks in local search. One of the main downsides to applying this strategy is that you will end up diluting the link building effect across multiple domains.
Another popular strategy is to create directories for each particular country you wish to target e.g. example.com/de or example.com/fr. By adding these particular country code directories into your web structure, you are essentially telling Google that these directories should appear in localised search for the specific country code being targeted. The next step you should take is to create a Google Webmaster Tools account for each particular directory and then set the Geo-Targeting to the country of your choice.
Another consideration when optimising for local search engines is the translation of content and the location of your server. It's often beneficial to ensure that your web server is located in the country to which you content is targeted to. It's also beneficial to translate your content into the native dialect not only will this improve how your website ranks but it will also have a significant impact on conversion rate. It's always advisable to seek out the assistance of professional translation services avoid using free translation tools for this purpose.