Geotargeting
Geotargeting means delivering content or ads to users based on their location – a key setting in international SEO and paid search.
What is geotargeting?
Geotargeting is the practice of delivering content or ads to users based on their location – their country, region, city or a radius around an address. It is one of the most important levers in international marketing, because the same offer often needs a different message, price or language in each market.
In paid search, geotargeting is set per campaign in Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising. One setting is easy to miss: by default, Google Ads targets people who are in or regularly show interest in a location. For most businesses, “Presence: people in or regularly in your targeted locations” is the safer choice, so a budget meant for Germany isn’t spent on people elsewhere who merely search about Germany. Combine location targeting with the right languages and market-specific bids.
In SEO, there is no single geotargeting switch. Search engines infer the target market from signals such as country-code domains, hreflang tags, local content, addresses and currency, and links from the country. Google retired the old country-targeting setting in Search Console (see International Targeting).
On websites, redirecting visitors automatically by IP address is risky: it can block search engine crawlers, which mostly crawl from the US, from seeing other versions. A better practice is to suggest the right version with a banner and let users choose.