How to Target Country Specific Website Traffic?

[seoninj]

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.

[Alick300]

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

[seoninj]

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.

[Alick300]

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

[seoninj]

Thanks a lot for sharing this link. Hoping this will help.

[JonoAlderson]

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.