Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) has a set of extremely helpful utilities. One of these utilities allows you to set GeoTargeting for your website.
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What is Geotargeting of your website?
Some websites have content that is primarily targeted at a particular country or language. As such, the content of these websites will not be of high importance to the other countries in the world.
The geotargeting option in the Search Console allows you to set a geographic area that you think is the target of your website’s content. With this, You can select a country from the given list as your Geotarget country.
Setting a Geographic target country for your blog or website has both good and bad effects. This will depend on what your blog or website is all about.
Today let’s see the good and bad effects of setting geographic target country in Google webmasters tool. Good And Bad Effects of Setting Geographic Target Country
Google webmasters tool has plenty of very useful tools for webmasters. And setting a geographic target country for your blog or website is one of them.
The good side of geotargeting Website
If you are confused, what is the meaning of Geographic target country? What it means is that, if you set a specific target country, for example, India.
Google search will pay more importance to your site in SERP (search engine result pages) in India. So your blog or website will start to rank higher in India, than those sites having the same article.
Even though a lot of factors also matter to rank high in Google SERP. But when you set geographic target country, this will let Google know that the contents of your blog or website, are more useful for India, so Google will give higher priority to your blog or website.
The bad side of the Geotargetting website
Even though your blog or website may start ranking better in the target country (India in this example). The downside of this setup is your blog or website ranking will gradually fall in other countries.
Gradually your website may completely disappear in Google SERP, in other countries.
So Who should set Geographic Target Country?
You can set a Geographic target country if your target audience is from that country. For example, if your blog or website is in the Hindi language, obviously most of your readers will be from India, where Hindi is the main language.
Another example, if your website is providing local services for people living in UK – then you can safely set the geographic target country to the UK. Since you don’t expect people in the USA to avail of that service.
Final thoughts and conclusion
My advice is not to play with Geographic target country in the Google webmasters tool. Because this is not something that, you can give it a try and change later on if this doesn’t work for you.
Once you set a Geotarget country, you will find a drastic change in search rankings in all other Google domains.
Organic traffic to your blog or website will fall drastically. Because your website will start to get demoted in the rest of the world.
If at a later stage, you are not satisfied and decide to change your geographic target country. it has been noticed that it may take several months for your website ranking to come back to that level before you changed geo-target.
Having said that, don’t mesh with Geographic target country settings unless your website really caters to a specific country or people. And absolutely NOT for increasing your online income.
Hello! I am Ben Jamir, Founder, and Author of this blog Tipsnfreeware. I blog about computer tips & tricks, share tested free Software’s, Networking, WordPress tips, SEO tips. If you like my post /Tips then please like and share it with your friends.
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