It doesn't matter how much traffic your company's website is receiving if those visits aren't likely to generate leads and sales. Therefore, if most of the traffic you're getting is from visitors outside of the geographical areas in which your business operates, you may need to take action. Let's take a look at some of the techniques you can use.
PPC Advertising – Improving The Geographical Effectiveness Of Your Ad Campaign
If your Google Ads results suggest your ads are being seen by people in inappropriate locations, log in to your account and check your campaign settings. If these aren't correct, not only will your ads be being delivered to people who can't buy your products instead of potential customers, you'll be paying for click-throughs that will never yield positive results.
Ad targeting
Consider your targeting options carefully. You can target search engine users in particular countries, specific areas within individual countries, or even within a set radius around your business, for example, or prevent your ads being shown to people in certain locations. We strongly suggest you also use the advanced location settings option and select the “target people in your targeted locations" and exclude the "people in, or who show interest in, your excluded locations (recommended)" options. If you’d rather not totally exclude certain areas, you can use location bid adjustments to pay more or less depending on the area that the search has come from. You can adjust social media adverts in the same manner, too.
Keywords
It's crucial to ensure that the keywords you're using in your adverts are appropriate too. For example, if you're promoting a brick and mortar business with a single store in North London, including the words "North London" in your ads should help.
Methods For Optimising Your Organic Search Results
Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to ensure that you only attract visitors from specific locations via the organic search listings. Search engines such as Google use complex algorithms in order to determine the order in which web pages appear for different searches, so you can't directly control who does and doesn't see your site in their results. However, if you're using a website analytics tool, such the one provided by HubSpot, and notice that an overwhelming number of your visitors are from overseas (or other places that aren't relevant to your operations), there are some things you can do.
- Ask an expert to carry out an audit of your website in order to determine whether it has any issues which could be affecting its visibility – e.g. being hosted on a server outside the UK. At JDR, we can provide you with a free 20-minute online meeting to discuss your site's structure and your digital marketing strategy without obligation.
- It's also worth reviewing your website's metadata to ensure that the titles, descriptions, and keywords you're using are optimised for the area in which your company operates, so the search engines will index your pages for those terms.
- Check out Google My Business. This free tool allows you to control how your business appears on a search results page, enabling you to optimise your cover photo, headlines, page titles, and more. You can also make adjustments for location-based searches. Remember – first impressions count!
- If you only sell your products or services to people in the UK, you could consider preventing anyone with a foreign IP address from accessing your site. Your website administrator should be able to block specific IP addresses or ranges of IP addresses for you.
- It's also possible that some of the traffic that you're getting is from spambots, programs that crawl websites looking for data to add to spammers' mailing lists. You can block the IP addresses of well-known bots, but be careful when doing this. If you make an error, you could prevent search engine spiders from crawling your website, which may result in it being removed from the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Get A Better ROI From Your Website
If you want your website to provide you with an exceptional return on investment, it could be worth hiring an agency with in-depth knowledge of digital marketing. Contact us to find out more about our business growth services.
Image source: Pixabay 
