How can I personalize content based on a state/region? Is it possible?

[OrendaLtd]

I'm getting a lot of traffic from different regions throughout the US. I need to personalize the content in my website or on a certain landing page based on the users state/region. Is it possible? For example, forwarding a user that lands on page "x" to page "y" if he's from California and to page "z" if he's from South Carolina.

And of course, can this somehow affect my rankings in Google?

Thanks!!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Gal,

Are you talking about a local business with physical locations in California and South Carolina, or are you talking about a national business that does not make in-person transactions with customers?

[Saijo.George]

You can use some of the tools here to personalize content on your landing page, that said Google will try and rank you for the content it sees when they crawl the site. You can try and see what they see using The Fetch as Google tool from Search Console.

Targeting Monkey

[OrendaLtd]

Hi Miriam,

I'm talking about a local business in California that tends to get a lot of irrelevant traffic out of state which affects some of the statistics and quality of leads we're getting.

I'm looking to deliver different content to out of state users.

[OrendaLtd]

Thanks, but Targeting Monkey doesn't answer my need.

I need a complete overhaul of the content if a person is out of state (even a redirect might be a fit)

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Gal,

If this is a local business that only serves customers in California, why would you want to create content for people in others states? What is the goal with that?

Do you feel you've done a really good job of ensuring that your current content is properly optimized for the city in which you're located or the California cities you serve, or could it be that your local optimization is not sending a clear enough signal to Google regarding the target audience?

More questions than answers, so far Want to be sure the community fully understand your scenario.

[OrendaLtd]

Hey Miriam,

I'll try to explain it in detail,

It's a local business, the page i'm talking about is an inner page that drives traffic from a lot of places in the US. It has some relevant traffic (only if it comes from California) and some irrelevant traffic (out of state visitors). The page generates leads, some of the leads are qualified because they're from California, some of them are not, because they're not from California. The problem this generates is the quality of the ratio in leads and a difficulty to measure them. What I want to do is to deliver different content to out of state users (it might be a redirect or even blocking them from entering the page) in order to ensure the quality of traffic.

Hope this makes it clearer

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Gal!

That's a good explanation, thanks. I honestly would not suggest trying to block people from other areas from accessing your website. For all you know, they could be doing research for a family member who lives in your area. Now, I'm no traffic wizard, so I'm actually going to ask a team member to add to this discussion, but from a purely Local SEO perspective, I'd suggest that you:

1. Be sure you've really stressed on the page the geography of the service being offered. That means titles, tags, text, internal links, etc.

2. Be happy your page is strong enough to rank beyond its service area. If it's getting a lot of out-of-state traffic despite doing all you can in point #1, perhaps there's some way for you to monetize that page, whether with ads or as a lead source of some kind.

Let's hope we can get you some more feedback on this.

[OrendaLtd]

Thank you!

[RuthBurrReedy]

I agree with Miriam. The only thing I would add here - consider making changes to your lead conversion form to reinforce the "we only work in California" aspect. This could be like a check box up front that says "Are you located in California?" If they select "No," the rest of the form disappears and they get a message that says "At this time, we're only able to serve the California area. Thank you for your interest!" or something. You could keep your lead form as-is and if people select a state other than California when entering their location information, send them to a different thank you page that delivers a similar message.

Basically, I would recommend changing your lead process so that a.) it's really clear to users that you don't operate outside of California, and b.) the information about whether or not a lead is from California is easy to see up-front in your lead management system. You'll probably still get some irrelevant leads (everyone does), but you'll be able to deal with them quicker.