Recent stats indicate the google now accounts for approx 79% of the search engine market in Europe.
If you are an organisation that covers a market the extends beyond various borders its good to
know that you can target your website towards multiple geographic areas using
free tools provided by google via its webmaster tools area.
Now this is only applicable to owners of TLD (Top Level Domains) .com .net .biz
How google determines what region your website targets:
Google uses the following criteria to determine what geographical region a particular
website is targeted towards.
- The physical location where the website is hosted, if it’s hosted in Dublin on an
Irish IP Address. - The website address of the respective domain.
If the domain has a defining country code (CC)
like www.yourwebsitename.ie ( .ie represents Ireland)
Therefore if your website has a .ie domain and is hosted in Ireland it will be determined by google to be an Irish website and it will more than likely feature high on the google.ie results pages.
This is fundamentally important as anyone who is searching on google from Ireland will automatically be redirected to Google.ie, so if your business is targeting this market and is not meeting this criteria that
Google lays down then you are essentially fighting an uphill struggle.
Some Challenges with Geo Targeting
Top Level domains such as .com & .net
These are considered to be geographically neutral
IE: they are not attached to a specific region like a (CC) Country Code domain like yourbusiness.ie
One of the challenges facing the owner of one of these domains is that they are essentially geographically neutral, so they need to be hosted in the same region as to where their target market is located, otherwise its difficult for google to establish where they are targeting.
An example, let’s say (hypothetically) the Irish times news paper created a domain www.irishtimes.com
and a website and it was hosted in the USA. But its main market for the newspaper was located in Ireland.
Google would most likely assume this website was a US website and it would therefore not necessarily feature in searches on google.ie
The solution to this problem:
To address this potential problem Google provides us with a tool to essentially geo target our
domains towards a particular region or country.
When should i use the Google Geo Targeting tool?
Geo targeting would mostly be required by companies who own one of these
Top Level Domains but that want to target a number of specific Geo Graphical areas or countries
How would this be achieved?
This can be achieved using the following methods:
By building individual subfolders on your website:
IE: www.irishtimes.com/ire/
And then setting the folder in the google webmaster area to ensure it points towards Ireland.
By Creating Sub-domains on your domain
IE: www.uk.irishtimes.com to target a UK market.
And then setting this subfolder in the google webmaster area to ensure it points towards the United Kingdom.
Points to note: To avoid duplicate content penalties, the information of
these sub sites or (sub-domains), should also be different.
Final summary re Geo Targeting via google webmaster tools:
This is best practised on domains that are termed as geographically
neutral or ( TLD ) top level domains, if you want to target a region in particular
its probably better to get a Country Code domain like techstore.ie
