Geotargeting

The Geotargeting It is a subarea within segmentation and belongs to the field of online marketing. Thanks to geolocation, advertisers or webmasters can control content and place ads targeting particular regions. The IP address, GPS data, databases and algorithms are used to locate users geographically.

Context

Segmentation is a very important part of marketing, because the number of conversions is supposed to increase with relevance in search results. Geotargeting is a segment of geo-marketing that should not be underestimated. Especially in the case of commercial promotion, users may have different requirements for ad clips or ad banners in different regions.

Fields of application of geotargeting

Geotargeting is not only used for precise targeting in online business promotion. The different areas of application are briefly described below:

Payment providers often use geotargeting to check online payment transactions by comparing the user's location with stored payment data.
Market research uses geographic data to reduce demand for specific products at the regional level.
Online ads can be placed in specific regions with geotargeting. Ad campaigns that use Bing Ads or Google AdWords ads can be more precisely targeted with geotargeting.
Programs designed to prevent Internet fraud, such as phishing, use geotargeting to discover suspicious inconsistencies.
The web portals of news stations or, for example, YouTube, use geotargeting to restrict the dissemination of content at the regional level for legal reasons.
Online stores rely on geotargeting to provide visitors with the correct language version or the closest local store.

Limitations

For geotargeting to work, the user's location must be accurately determined. However, as many users browse the Internet with VPN or a proxy server, they cannot be located exactly. Thus, the commercial promotion that is placed with a regional reference cannot be precisely adapted. Similarly, the use of VPNs or proxies prevents obtaining regional search results.

An example of this is the search function in the Google search engine with regional reference. If the user's location is determined automatically, Google enriches the search results with local search results. If the user's location is kept general, no regional Google Maps search results will appear.

Geotargeting and SEO

For SEOs, geotargeting plays an important role, especially in the area of local SEO. For example, websites can be optimized to rank well for certain keyword combinations and specific locations, and the appropriate version of the web portal returns results for a locally specified search query. Google recommends in the latter case, the hreflang note in the source code.^[1] To get the most out of a website for local searches, the copy should contain as many regional references as possible. At the same time, an entry in the search engine of Google Maps or Google+ Local can be an effective way to get listed in the SERPs for search queries with a local reference. The geolocation can also be reinforced with references in industry portals or local portals.