Geotargeting: cleanly controlling and playing out regional relevance
What geotargeting means, when it makes sense and how you set regional signals better technically and in terms of content.
The strongest effect usually arises when the topic is not only theoretically understood, but directly checked on real URLs, page types and search intentions.
What geotargeting means, when it makes sense and how you set regional signals better technically and in terms of content. This wiki page arranges the topic practically and shows, When priority arises, which mistakes are often and how you derive concrete measures from them.
Example: German and Austrian offers differ
Two language versions use German, but name different delivery areas and conditions. Check whether each version has its own accessible URL and whether hreflang describes the appropriate regions. Automatic IP forwarding can make it difficult to check and access other variants.
Regional assignment does not arise solely from the server location. Content, offer and voice/region signals must match. Let visitors change the region and test the pages even without a saved location decision.
What is geotargeting for?
The method for determining location is useful for marketing purposes, but also serves for security, for example in the case of locating an accidented person or the retrieval of lost or stolen mobile devices. The most common application is geomarketing. This is an essential condition for the Local SEO: Advertisements are displayed in a targeted and cost-effective manner for a specific region in which the provider has its location or wants to sell.
Users who start a corresponding search query from this location see this advertisement directly, which even works without additional OnPage SEO (incorporating keywords with a local reference on the company’s website). Local OnPage SEO also supports the process. It is also possible to target customers on smartphones if they are in the region in question and have not switched off the GPS location of their device. There are also more geotargeting applications. Here are some examples:
- For the control of online marketing, it is useful to identify the locations from which certain promotional offers have been accessed.
- Some companies, including payment provider PayPal, use geolocation to protect their customers from fraud. If someone accesses a PayPal account from a location that is incompatible with their address, PayPal may require additional verification.
- For market research, it is also useful to determine the demand in different regions.
- There are email marketing providers that tell their customers if and where a mail has been opened.
- Offers in journalism and entertainment (also on YouTube) are sometimes only shown in certain countries. A user outside this region cannot see them.
- Payment providers use geointelligence to automatically offer a customer their country’s currency.
- Content distribution networks distribute their load using geointelligence.
- Automated telemedical care systems also use the location of their patients for all emergency care.
- Companies with several branches assign visitors to their website a suitable stationary location where they can shop.
Blocking geotargeting
Users do not always want to be able to determine their location. On mobile devices, GPS location can be switched off. Anyone who goes into the network from a stationary connection can conceal his IP address via Tor. An additional VPN makes location even more difficult. Even without these methods, it is not always easy to assign a stationary computer to a specific person, because IPs are also allocated dynamically.
However, they are always assigned to an owner, who can of course also be a university or an Internet provider. In principle, the owners of IP addresses can freely decide which addresses they assign to which network node. They can also change this allocation, but the effort is considerable. If the data runs on a proxy server, its location can be localized, but not readily that of the user.
What is geointelligence?
This goes beyond the mere technical location determination. It also links these with rules based on the location. This means that visitors are shown country-specific content on one and the same website: in Germany other than in France or Poland. IP intelligence can also be used to add qualitative factors such as an optimised connection to a specific network node.
How accurate are geotargeting methods?
As a rule, they work very accurately, but there are differences between individual users of geolocation. In principle, the aim is to achieve a data completeness of 99.99%, which means that the software used knows almost every IP address and can determine all GPS data. However, the knowledge of IP addresses, for example, does not mean that every user can be automatically identified because the IPs can also belong to providers whose networks can be identified for a region, but not for a specific location.
Therefore, further parameters for localization are used. This includes the identification of company servers, proxies, bandwidths, domains and longitudes and latitudes. Furthermore, the geotargeting method used must also be powerful enough, i.e. must technically handle a sufficient number of accesses. There are differences here, which is why not every provider of network content can determine the location of its users with the same accuracy.