Every website out there is aimed at an audience of some sort. While some are aimed at the entire world, others are targeting a specific city or region. There may be specific marketing strategies that work in that area. Also, since businesses in a specific area probably only serve the customers in that area, customers aren't going to want to see any of these companies in their search results. To accommodate both businesses and customers, the concept of Geo Targeting needs to be included in your marketing and website development strategy.



Some paid advertising programs like AdWords actually create dynamic advertising on a website. The ads on a website for a company in New York, for example, would all be about New York businesses or at least New York related in some way. Prior to SEO, of course, this was nearly impossible to do. Now, thanks to the fact that many keywords are embedded in websites and in website metadata, it's much easier to target a specific region instead of using generic ads that, while somewhat useful, may not be appropriate for some areas.

Aren't most people searching the internet because they can't find what they want locally? Actually, most findings show that individuals generally search for things that are local. While shopping may be the exception, many other searches - airfare, homes for sale/rent, specific information about local news events - are usually focused on the region in which the searcher lives. Since search engines now allow searches based on location and rank sites by relevance to a searcher's location, it only makes sense to start making websites and web advertising target a specific regional audience as well.

So what tells a search engine where your business is located? There are several things. A domain with a .uk in its name, obviously, means that the website is designed for a UK audience. This is why web designers may want to get a specific country website domain instead of a neutral .com or .net address.

The location of the web server is also a clue, although some sites are hosted in other regions or countries. However, many search engines see a .com hosted on a UK server as being the same as a .uk site, which can be helpful. While finding cheap web hosting on a server abroad may seem like a good business decision, it may be worth a little extra money to have your site hosted on a local server.

Search engines will also analyze where your web traffic is coming from. If most of it comes from a specific region or country, that will be taken into consideration. Likewise, the language your website is written in will also contribute to determining its correct region. For SEO purposes, including a specific city or country name in the text may also help the search engine focus on a region.

Google also includes several features specific to their search engine that help it determine the correct region. The address on the website can be pulled and referenced by Google Maps to help determine location, and Google includes a specific tool for webmasters to use that verifies the correct region for a specific website.

All of these factors can help a search engine determine what region your website should be listed in and help direct dynamic ads as to what kind of content they should display.