SEO Implications of Setting Geographic Target in Google Webmaster Tools

by Patrick Altoft on October 31, 2007

Google has taken an interesting step today and now allows you to specify the geographic location of your website using a form in Webmaster Tools.

If your site is targeting users within a particular geographic location, you can use our geographic target tool to provide us with information that will help improve our search results, providing greater relevancy for our users.

While this is a good move for most site owners I’m still not sure whether I should set my location or not.

People who want to feature in the “Pages from the UK” results normally have to have either a UK specific domain (eg .co.uk or .uk.com) OR be hosted in the UK with a generic domain such as a .net, .org or .com.
Now Google is letting people state their location down to street level. People with a .com site hosted in the US might actually be in the UK so if they were to specify their location it’s likely their search rankings would drop in the US and rise in the UK. Would that mean a big drop in traffic? It depends on the niche.

BlogStorm is a .co.uk and is hosted in the US. It ranks well for queries in the UK but not as well for queries in the US. Would I get more traffic by giving my address as somewhere in the US? How much would my UK traffic drop by if I converted to a US site?

My site is equally useful for people outside the UK as people in the UK so targeting an international audience wouldn’t be misleading.

Without any real answers I think I might do an experiment to take BlogStorm to a friends US address for a month or two.

Perhaps Matt might swing by with some comments on this.

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{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }

Caroline Middlebrook 31 Oct 2007 at 10:19 am: Interesting. I am also UK based but I deliberately went with a .com domain and my host is in the US because that’s where most of the search traffic is and my blog has a worldwide audience, there is nothing UK specific about it.

Really, I think this is only useful if your business / website somehow caters better to the local area. If not, I dont see a benefit. However, it will be interesting to see your results Patrick.
Shimon 31 Oct 2007 at 4:45 pm: I guess your location should be worldwide, because you’re not so targeted like for example my website.
Adam Taylor 31 Oct 2007 at 11:04 pm: I’d be interested to see what happens. I’m in the same position with TLD / hosting…

I don’t get enough search traffic to be able to perform that kind of experiment myself though.
Matt 07 Dec 2007 at 9:49 am: Hmm, this is interesting. My business is based in Hull, where we have premises. the website is available to all in the UK, but one of the top keywords is “space clothing”/”space clothing hull” so it shows that locals are searching for us. i dont think this function will benefit me really.
SEO Hawk Blog 09 Dec 2007 at 11:25 am: Search Engines ( especially Google) has a habit of keeping webmasters in dark.

Google has launched this tool, but it is not sure how it will be perceived by website owners/seo.

I do not feel that Google will give up on web hosting and other information which it collects through back links.

Lets just keep our fingers crossed for the next few months
John Scott Cothill 12 Dec 2007 at 2:27 pm: Certain industries you would not want to use this in – For example:
Travel industry. Remember, you are telling Google which location your targeted audience is. So if you are selling European holiday, you wouldn’t want to set the location to Europe, thus alienating non-European searchers.

If however you have an ecommerce shop and you understand from your analytical data that more visitors come from UK (UK based ecommerce site), thus you would want to set geographic location to UK to enhance your SERP position.

I’ve tried this out on one of my sites and I started noticing a change in 2 key areas. 1) Visitors 2) Change in SERPS.

I found an increased traffic volume due to SERP positioning gains on Google UK. Google SERPs – no change.

All in all, this is a great new addition to Webmaster tools, but be warned – Keep in mind your current analytical data and ensure your site is needing to target a specific location. If not, stay well away!

Regards John
SEO Blog : SEO HAWK 13 Dec 2007 at 11:00 am: Google has recently launched this tool, and I am still unsure about several facts related to your website hosting/back links etc etc. Google will also introduce several filters to check any sub-domain spam websites targeting all major locations around the globe.

Meanwhile, we did used this option on one of our clients website, but it has gone out of phase. We are not sure whether Google is in the process of shifting rankings to a particular database located within a specific geo location. We are still waiting for google to update its database. In case we do not see any improvement in rankings, we would be left we no other option than to revert back to default settings. Google says something, and it always mean something else as usual
jones 20 Feb 2008 at 5:02 pm: I’m a US site, I set my location to US and immediately my site disappeared from the SERP!! What’s going oN?? I used to be on the first page for my terms and now I’m not even there!!
sherif 23 Apr 2008 at 12:38 pm: I have been searching allover the internet to know the impact of setting geographical target on my rank through other SERP’s but i couldn’t find anything to assure what googlers in charge stated earlier about the rank not being reduced in other territories.
If there is any update regarding this case please share it as i am afraid of loosing the results i have reached by using Geo targeting.
My client is mainly targeting UK and Australia so i don’t want to loose potential visitors by limiting my audience to UK.
Your help would be really appreciated.
Pub Toilets 14 May 2008 at 2:18 pm: Our listings dropped quite considerably when we set to UK only, so we had to undo it.

I agree with the comment from John Scott Cothill about the travel industry, that makes sense for our site too.

Pub Toilets
G 22 Jun 2008 at 12:06 am: I’m also very interested in how this might affect search results – I opted for a .com domain, and chose a host my site in the US.

To be honest at the time I didn’t think about the fact that by hosting in the US and using a .com domain I would automatically remove myself from UK only results. In retrospect, it should have been obvious..

However I also bought the identical .co.uk as well, initially just to use as a redirect – but now I can see it could play an important part in UK search results, music is generally universal, but a good part of my current marketplace is certainly in the UK, so not appearing in UK only results could be damaging.

A FEW QUESTIONS THOUGH:

Will Google rank and list my simple redirect page on the .co.uk domain as highly as my .com domain that actually contains the content? I get a feeling it wont. maybe I should actually host the content on my UK domain name?

Or should I set up 2 identical sites? and host the UK one as a subdomain on the main site? – or would google completely knock one off for being duplicate content..? How does google treat subdomains with identical content?

any clues and advice greatly appreciated!!

G
Patrick Altoft 22 Jun 2008 at 5:52 pm
Find me on Twitter: I would suggest either hosting your .com in the UK or using your .co.uk domain instead.

Don’t use two websites.
More comments from Patrick Altoft
מוצרי פרסום 20 Jul 2008 at 1:58 pm: Sp from the comments I read here I understand it is not a positive thing to limit your site to a region, just let google index it normally with out any restrictions?

Thank
kiwi freelancer 30 Nov 2008 at 10:00 am: it good for seo…! cos i think the site only popular for region we use…!