Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to Target Country Specific Website Traffic?
-
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.
-
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.
-
-
Thanks a lot for sharing this link. Hoping this will help.
-
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
-
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.
-
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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Hreflang and canonical tag for new country specific website - different base domain
I have a little different situation compared to most other questions which asks for hreflang and canonical tags for country specific version of websites. This is an SEO related question and I was hoping to get some insight on your recommendations. We have an existing Australian website - say - ausnight.com.au now we want to launch a UK version of this website - the domain is - uknight.co.uk please note, we are not only changing from .com.au to .co.uk.... but the base domain name as well changed - from ausnight to uknight as you can understand, the audience for both websites is different. Both websites has most pages same with same contents.... the questions I have is - Should we put canonical tag on the new website pages? If we don't put canon tag on new website pages, what is the impact on the SEO ranking of current website? I believe we need to put hreflang tag on both websites to tell google that we have another language version (en-au vs en-gb) of the same page. Is this correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TinoSharp0 -
Someone redirected his website to ours
Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us? Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kahuna_Charles1 -
How to rank my website in Google UK?
Hi guys, I own a London based rubbish removal company, but don't have enough jobs. I know for sure that some of my competitors get most of their jobs trough Google searches. I also have a website, but don't receive calls from it at all. Can you please tell me how to rank my website on keywords like: "rubbish removal london", "waste clearance london", "junk collection london" and other similar keywords? I know that for person like me (without much experience in online marketing) will be difficult task to optimize the website, but at least - I need some advices from where to start. I'm also thinking to hire an SEO but not sure where to find a trusted company. Most importantly I have no idea how much should pay to expect good results? What is too much and what is too low? I will appreciate all advices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gorubbishgo0 -
Two websites vs each other owned by same company
My client owns a brand and came to me with two ecommerce websites. One website sells his specific brand product and the other sells general products in his niche (including his branded product). Question is my client wants to rank each website for basically the same set of keywords. We have two choices I'd like feedback on- Choice 1 is to rank both websites for same keyword groupings so even if they are both on page 1 of the serps then they take up more real estate and share of voice. are there any negative possibilities here? Choice 2 is to recommend a shift in the position of the general industry website to bring it further away from the industry niche by focusing on different keywords so they don't compete with each other in the serps. I'm for choice 1, what about you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Drop in traffic after redesign
Is it common for a site to see slight traffic drops after a site redesign (containing cleaner code, more usability and basically just being more helpful for the end user)? A new site of ours went live last Wednesday and has experienced a drop in traffic. If you have seen this in your own site, how did you recover? And how long did the recovery take?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Effects of having both http and https on my website
You are able to view our website as either http and https on all pages. For example: You can type "http://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as http: as you navigate the site. You can also type "https://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as https: as you navigate the site. My question is....if you can view the entire site using either http or https, is this being seen as duplicate content/pages? Does the same hold true with "www.mywebsite.com" and "mywebsite.com"? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rexjoec1 -
Different domains for multilingual website
Hey guys, A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language. So for example: word1word2.com for the english version word3word4.com for the french version word5word6.com for spanish version .... Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/... Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs. Thank You.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruLee0 -
Splitting one Website into 2 Different New Websites with 301 redirects, help?
Here's the deal. My website stbands.com does fairly well. The only issue it is facing a long term branding crisis. It sells custom products and sporting goods. We decided that we want to make a sporting goods website for the retail stuff and then a custom site only focusing on the custom stuff. One website transformed and broken into 2 new ones, with two new brand names. The way we are thinking about doing this is doing a lot of 301 redirects, but what do we do with the homepage (stbands.com) and what is the best practice to make sure we don't lose traffic to the categories, etc.? Which new website do we 301 the homepage to? It's rough because for some keywords we rank 3 or 4 times on the first page. Scary times, but something must be done for the long term. Any advise is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance. We are set for a busy next few months 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hyrule0