KNOWLEDGE BASE

Geotargeting

Geotargeting is the simplest idea in this whole silo: show different things to people in different places. It is also the one most likely to be implemented in a way that quietly destroys a website's ability to rank, because a search engine crawler is <em>also</em> somewhere.

Read the Guides ← Back to Hyperlocal

In-dash car sat nav screen showing a route map on the dashboard — Photo: John Torcasio, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Geotargeting Guides

Each guide is split into a four-part series.

What Is Geotargeting in Digital Marketing

How IP Geolocation Finds a Searcher
How Location Targeting Works in Google Ads
How Geotargeting Works in SEO
How Geotargeting Works on Facebook Ads

Geofencing vs Geotargeting and How They Differ

How Precise Geofencing and Geotargeting Are
When to Use Geofencing or Geotargeting
Geoconquesting Explained for Local Businesses
How to Combine Geofencing and Geotargeting

What Is Geotargeting?

Geotargeting is the practice of delivering different content to a user based on their location — determined from an IP address, a GPS coordinate, or a declared preference. The classic implementations are showing a country-specific homepage, or restricting an ad to a region. The classic mistakes are more interesting.

The crawler has a location too.

If your site shows different content depending on where the visitor appears to be, the search engine is a visitor. What it sees is what gets indexed. Cloaking content behind a location check is one of the more reliable ways to make a page invisible for the very searches it was built for.

A user's location is a guess, not a fact.

IP-based location is approximate, and gets worse with VPNs, mobile networks and corporate proxies. Any system that assumes the guess is right — and hides content from people it misidentifies — is trading real visitors for a personalization gain it can't measure.

The durable version is additive, not substitutive.

Serving extra relevance to a nearby visitor is safe. Replacing what everyone else can see is not. That distinction is the whole difference between geotargeting that compounds and geotargeting that costs you rankings.

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