Google Analytics and Geotargeting a website for more than one country
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Hi
Google Analytics settings can geotarget to just one main location from what I can see. But is there a way to target the website to more than 1 location. The domain is currently a .co.uk so it is UK specific, and from my knowledge I understand that popular and well ranked pages in any country can rank outside of the geotargeted area. Aside from canonicalising new url's with relevant keywords, meta tagging new pages, and creating unique rich content tailored to countries is there anything else I can do, in your opinion?
Thanks.
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I guess you are referencing the geo targeting in the Search Console - there is no geo targeting in Analytics.
If you have a country specific TLD like .co.uk your site is automatically targeted to the uk market. Geo targeting is only possible for 'neutral' TLD's like .com,.net,.org,...etc. If you site is targeted to one specific country it's very difficult to rank for keywords outside the geographic area. On a .co.uk domain it's virtually impossible to create a section that targets Australian customers.In that case - you would need to buy a .au domain or a generic domain. If you want to target multiple countries and buying different local tld's is not possible - you can buy a generic one (.com) - and target parts of the site to a specific country like
mydomain.com/uk => target uk
mydomain.com/au => target au ... etcDon't know what you mean with "canonicalising new url's with relevant keywords" - for international content you shouldn't use canonical url's to point to your main content - rather use href lang tags to make it obvious to search engines which part of the site is targeted to which audience.
Some useful resources:
International SEO checklist (Moz) Hreflang attributes (Google)
International SEO (Moz)
Country Targeting (Google)
Geo-Targeting Your Pages for Specific Audiences (Bing) -
Hi Dirk
Many thanks for the information and your explanation. 40% of traffic coming to the website is from America and 50% from the UK so why do you think that so much traffic can come from the US in view of what you said. I can use this going forward and really appreciate the time you took to answer. A thumbs up from me.
Kind Regards.