Geo-targeting
Aligning pages and signals to a geographic market.
Geo-targeting in plain English
Geo-targeting means aligning your website with the location you want to serve, whether that's a country, a region or a town. Signals include your domain (such as .co.uk), content written for that market, local addresses and phone numbers, prices in the local currency, hreflang for multi-country sites and links from local sources.
How to check geo-targeting on your site
Read your site as a UK customer would. Are spelling, currency, contact details and delivery information clearly British? In Search Console, check the Countries tab in the Performance report to see where your impressions come from. If they don't match your customers, adjust your content and signals.
A worked example
A UK skincare brand's site uses ".com", American spelling and no mention of UK delivery. Some of its traffic comes from the US, where it doesn't ship. It switches to UK spelling, adds clear UK delivery and returns pages and shows prices in pounds. UK visibility improves and wasted overseas traffic drops.
Where it usually goes wrong
- Mixing UK and US spelling and currency.
- Hiding your location or service area.
- Using IP-based redirects that stop Googlebot seeing some versions.
- Creating country versions without the content and support to back them up.
Why a small site should care
A UK business using a .com domain, US spelling and prices in dollars may confuse both visitors and search engines about who it serves. For most UK small businesses, the fix is simple: write for UK customers, show UK contact details and use local signals for the areas you cover.
It also matters within the UK. A business serving only Scotland or one county should make that obvious, so visitors elsewhere aren't disappointed and searchers nearby recognise a local option.
Connected technical terms
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