The Ways To Make Your Website Target Country-Specific Audience

One of the advantages of digital ads is that we can target them geographically, and save a lot of amount of the digital spend. And for multi-lingual and multi-country marketing, there’s a whole industry for them to thrive.

Most marketers know that traffic from developed nations, such as the U.S., converts better in terms of advertising revenue and affiliate sales. The reason is simple: users in those places have higher "purchasing power" and are more open to internet commerce.

If your website is located in a country that is not a developed nation, you may want to target those people instead of your local audience. While you can certainly increase your income, but there is a catch: competition. The market in developed nation is more crowded.

Depending on your business plan, you may realize that targeting your local audience will convert more because of the less competition and better supply-demand ratio. This can be more true to niches that are specific, detailed and unique.

Flags

But if do really want to target developed nations, and/or having most of your website revenue coming from Google's AdSense for example, you can follow the tricks below to give search engines the signals they need.

There is, of course, the easy solution, which is buying country-specific traffic, which can work in the case of commercial and e-commerce sites.

But if you want to reach your audience using organic means, going au naturel should be the best way of gaining traffic from specific countries

Country-Specific Domain Extensions

On the web, it starts with a good domain name. And this should be followed by the appropriate domain extension.

Top level domain extensions like .com and .org usually rank higher on global search engines because they are in fact target a more global audience. But if you want your website to target a specific country, you may consider buying that country's unique domain extension.

For example, bloggers in Indonesia may want to use .id domain extension because they should rank better in Google Indonesia. Likewise, you can target the U.S. better if you own a .us domain extension. And for traffic from the UK, a .co.uk should be the best for you.

However, you may want to preserve your brand. And for this reason, you need to first own popular TLDs like .com first before expanding to use more country-specific domain extensions.

Google Webmaster Tool Geo-Targeting

International Targeting

The next best and easiest way to target specific country, is to tell Google that you want to target that country.

Since most website's traffic comes from Google, letting Google knows which country you target should help you in reaching that country better. To do this, you need to first login into your Google account associated with your website, to then go to Search Console (Google Webmaster Tool).

Under 'Search Traffic', choose 'International Targeting' and select your desired country.

Server Location

Where is your server? Is it located near your targeted audience?

Another factor that drives country-specific traffic is the location of your server. If your target audience resides in the U.S., it would be better if your website is hosted in U.S.-based servers. This is to ensure that your website load faster in that country due to the server's IP, and search engines bots will be able to determine the location of your server.

All of this can help your site to rank higher in your targeted country.

Backlinks

Backlink

The part of SEO that can never be separated. Backlinks are used to determine the popularity of content. While much have changed over time, but the importance of backlinks remains significant.

This particular reason makes it wise for you to target country-specific backlinks in order to target country-specific traffic.

So if you want to target users in the U.S. for example, you may want to leverage link building by taking advantage of guest blogging opportunities on U.S.-based websites. You can also start learning how to comment on blogs properly.

You can also try submitting your website to local search engines and local web directories. This should generate country-specific backlinks which provide significant factor in determining the geo-location of your traffic.

Content And Keyword Targeting

You may have a website that is hosted in the U.S. and backlinks originated mostly in the U.S.. Another important signal that Google uses to determine which country you are targeting, is your contents.

From the language of your posts, the meta titles and descriptions, the keywords your chose and others. They are all signals that your are targeting a specific country.

You can also use online tools to find out which keywords are popular with your targeted audience. Knowing the keywords you can create a content strategy based on them. Then after the contents have been published, you need to keep track of the keywords' progress in your targeted country. This should allow you to know which strategies are working and which aren't.

This way, you can write your business plan, and make your targeted country your top priority.

Local SEO

If you are running a service website or an e-commerce website, you can use Google My Business to add generic signal to Google for local ranking.

After claiming your business, you can add related information such as address, phone number and so forth. This should help Google in knowing the location of your business.

You can also create social media profiles on various websites, and fill out the information in an effort to help your business to get more local citations.

Further reading: How Search Engines Process Your Queries Determines Your Satisfaction