Yes that right geo-targeting has been introduced into the Webmaster Tools function of Google, allowing you to go down to street level for specific search. If you don’t know what all the excitement is about, let me explain.

Before this was introduced if you had a dot com address and a foreign server you couldn’t get a UK listing, as Google used the Url and server to identify the area you were targeting also. The location of the registrar of the domain will also identify the geo targeted area. This has been the downfall of many business with limited understanding in the area of SEO. As they have often wanted only to target the UK but have got their server in another country to save costs and only a dot com address therefore not getting the UK listing .

This also impacted websites that want listings in a different country, before this introduction if you wanted a UK listing and let’s say an Australian listing you would need two URL addresses .co.uk and .au to go to two separate homepages, now with Google Webmaster Tools you can geo-target sub folders. For instance if you want to geo-target the two locations above you would create two sub folder i.e www.yoursite.com/uk & www.yoursite.com/as, each with their own Webmaster Tool, one targeting UK listings, the other to Australian listings. The downside is both homepages of the sub folders need to be different to avoid a duplicate content penalty, but this was also the case with the old method.

The other great benefit is that you can geo-target a particular city, so if your business is only applicable to say Manchester, you can inform Webmaster Tools that this is the area you want to be targeting, therefore improving your rankings in that specific area.

Now before you rush out and start fiddling with your geo-targeting, it has to be said this is a new feature therefore there is limited advice online on the effect this will have on your rankings. If you want to reach a global audience I would leave well alone, as if you geo target a specific city your traffic would decrease but your bounce rate will drop. I will report later in the year when I have more testing data available to me on the exact effects.

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