Geographical SEO – Where In The World??

Have you ever looked for a service or business on-line and had no idea where it was located? Did you have to navigate to their contact page only to discover that your Google search inadvertently took you to another country? If this is the case, that website probably didn’t have very good Geographical SEO.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. For more information on that, check out our post on SEO And Your Content.

What Is Geographical SEO?

Geographical SEO is just another small piece of the whole SEO picture. G-SEO ensures that your service or business is physically located with the search engines so that local customers and clients can find you. Internet searches do usually tend to deliver local results, but if there are no local results available, the search engine increases its radius from the point of origin of the person doing the search.

If the physical location of your service or business is not properly indexed, the search engines don’t know where to place you … in the world. That means you may not appear on local searches. There are several reasons why your site may not appear geographically correct.

No Location Specified

If you don’t actually say where you are, search engines can’t place you. That means any SEO is based solely on the type of business or purpose of the site. If someone in Detroit is looking for a plumber, they don’t want to be given the names of plumbers in Chicago. Your location must be specified properly if you want people in your local area to find you.

Wrong Location

A website owner from London contacted us requesting SEO. The client was very happy with the fact they were getting lots of hits on their site and were high in ranking, however, they were being found by clients in England. This client was in London, Ontario. Their previous SEO guy had failed to add “Ontario, Canada” as part of the G-SEO. If the name of your town or city belongs to more that one metropolitan area, you may need to specify your state, province or country.

Name Recognition

G-SEO also has the ability to exclude locations where you don’t want to get results. One of our clients wanted us to include Windsor, Ontario, but exclude Brazil and Russia. Why? Because he was getting lots of results from those countries. The reason for that was his name. This client offered a personal service – his name was his business. People in Brazil were apparently looking for someone locally who had the same name.

No Physical Location

What do you do if you have an e-business? One of our clients offers an on-line service. This particular service offered digital media and could easily accept clients from anywhere in the world. Since the business itself had no physical location, G-SEO was based on where the client wanted to target for clients.

In The General Area Of …

Some businesses want to offer services within a general area. However, targeting “Southern Georgia” or “Smith County” may not deliver the proper results for G-SEO. Internet searches don’t tend to include counties or regions (and southern Georgia is a really big area). People tend to search based on their own town or city, or the nearest big city to them. People who are located between two major metropolitan areas may search both of those areas. In that case multiple targets for G-SEO may offer the best results.

And The Results Are In …

No matter where you are located (if you even have a location) or what your target areas are, Geographical SEO can mean the difference between no rank, and top rank in the wrong country. When Geographical SEO is done properly, that means you’ll be included and ranked high in the search results for your local area, the location you’re targeting, or both. If you need help locating your business or targeting the right area for results, contact an SEO expert who knows how to use G-SEO to your advantage.

More information on our SEO Services.