Geo Targeting Your Website

Darren Franks - September 9, 2009

According to Wikipedia.org, Geo Targeting is, “the method of determining the geolocation (the physical location) of a website visitor and delivering different content to that visitor based on his or her location, such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, Internet Protocol (IP) address, ISP or other criteria”.                                    

While it is not imperative that all websites focus attention on geo targeting, local businesses can benefit greatly, especially if your marketing budgets for more traditional marketing are limited. Simple methods such as adding the contact information for the business to the homepage content and meta data can increase your chances of showing up in local search directories or in the local results on Google.

Other good SEO techniques include adding county and city names to the page to narrow down the keyword targeting for the page.   For more internationally minded geo targeting, webmasters need to keep in mind the different terminology used in other countries. In the UK, web surfers will use different terminology than their contemporaries in Africa.

• What does Google look for?
• Your address and keywords listed on your site
• Your address and keywords listed on other sites
• Your address and keywords listed in local directories
• Reviews of your business
• Domain Name

Submitting to Local Search  
At the very least, local businesses should start out by submitting to the oldest and most trusted of the directories (Yahoo! and DMOZ). After that, they should go for the large traditional business directories as they tend to rank well for many local terms. This increases reach in the search engines and positions the business as a local and trusted entity within its community.

Local Directories for Small Businesses to Consider:
Yahoo local — Very Important
Yelp.com
Yellowpages.com
Brownbook.com
Merchantcircle.com — ranks well
Citysearch.com
Superpages.com
Insiderpages.com — ranks well