So you have a website and you want to make sure you’re targeting a local search audience?
That’s actually not as hard as it might first seem – in fact, Google is already doing some of the work for you. Google Location will tailor the search results people see based on where they are, so people close to where you are should be more likely to see your site ranked higher in their results.
How is this done? It’s really quite simple…
Google Location’s Effect on Search Results
Google Location bases its search results on one of two things:
- IP address
- ‘My Location’ in Google Toolbar
Either of these can let Google know where a person is located – IP address automatically, and My Location as a manual setting.
There is no way to fully switch off Google Location; however, Google Toolbar users can manually edit their location to encourage search results relevant to a particular place to be returned on their results pages.
Location of Website Traffic
Depending on the nature of your website, search traffic might not be the major part of your visitor base.
If you have large amounts of type-in traffic, pay per click visitors or social media referrals, you might want to track the location of those audiences separately.
Our previous post on segmenting Twitter traffic in Google Analytics guides you through the basics of flagging your social media visitors so you can easily analyse them separately from the rest of your site traffic.
However, you can also segment your data by Source or Medium – along with plenty of other ways – by using the ‘Filter’ box at the bottom of most Google Analytics report pages to segment out the desired data on the fly.
Tracking Location with Ion.so
If you followed our guidance on setting up Twitter traffic tracking in TweetDeck, you should already be using Ion.so as your URL shortener.
The good news is, you can also use Ion.so to check which countries your clickthroughs occurred in.
Add an exclamation mark to the end of the Ion.so URL and you will be directed to the link’s statistics page – complete with a breakdown of which countries’ web users have been visiting your page.
