Telling Google Where Your Customers Are Located
1st November 2007 by Matt Hopkins
As I’ve mentioned before in previous blogs on local SEO, one of the challenges for a locally-oriented website/business is making sure that Google understands where your business (and target audience) is geographically located.
There are many ways to tell the search engines where your business is located – you can ensure that your address is on your site in the appropriate places as Google’s spiders are able to recognise address blocks. You can also make sure that your site is listed in the business directories that ultimately provide data to search engines such as Google. The challenge, however, is to tell Google where your customers are located.
Google has recently added a new facility in their webmaster tools that will allow you to assign a target geographical region for your site or business. This is a much simpler approach in the context of Google and I can only assume will be used as a ranking factor for web searches with "local intent" and eventually mobile search.
When you log in to the webmaster tools, you will see a new option under "Tools" on the left hand side of the web page called "set geographical target". Click on this and then enter the details that are relevant. If you only serve customers in a specific city or town then add these details but if you serve all of a county (e.g. Hampshire) then leave the city blank.
Note – this should only be done if you are targeting a limited geographical area and not simply to tell Google where your business is located.
Related Posts
- 3 ways to rank better in international versions of Google
- Google experimenting with Local Search Ads
- Google releases enhanced mobile search in the UK
- Ranking Subdirectories in International Versions of Google
- If You Don’t Optimise for Local Now, You’ll Hate Yourself Later
- Why should you know or care where your web site is physically located?
- 6 ways Google Webmaster Tools is helping webmasters
- The No 1 UK Local Search Query is?