Regional and IP Address Targeting

As the use of search engines becomes more common, they are increasingly taking the role of online ‘Yellow Pages’ directories, helping users find local products or services. If your business targets a specific town or region, how can you make sure that your site is found in these results through natural or PPC listings? Also, how can you minimise the amount of paid traffic to your website from people who are in the wrong location?

The first and most obvious method is to optimise your website so that your location is included alongside the main keywords (eg: ‘flowers in Brighton’). In some markets, the majority of people may search using this local method, although there may still be many people in Brighton who just search for ‘flowers’ but would prefer to use a local company. If you are also running a PPC advertising campaign, how do you reach them without exposing yourself to a large number of unwanted visits or paid clicks?

Some of the main search engines and PPC tools have introduced IP address targeting, which attempts to allow advertisers to target specific geographic areas. An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a unique number that identifies each internet connection from web servers or Internet Service Providers. Although the IP address can carry a range of identifying information, the only area that concerns us for search targeting is that it can carry information relating to a server’s location.

One result of this is on Google.co.uk, where UK-only searches generate results from sites that use a .uk domain name, or those that may have a .com or .net domain, but are hosted on a UK IP address. This is designed to enable all UK sites to be listed here, but problems can arise if a UK site uses a .com domain and is also hosted on a server that is not in the UK, in which case the site will not appear in the search results and may consequently lose a proportion of the potential search traffic being generated.

On Google Ads (AdWords), advertisers can target a specific geographical region or city in the UK – you will sometimes see the AdWords display ‘England’ or ‘London’ below the advert, which signifies this level of targeting. However, the limitation of this technique is a searcher may be located nowhere near the location of their server, or an Internet Service Provider may assign the same IP address to a range of users, meaning that they will be served adverts for the wrong location, or miss adverts that are more relevant for them.

This level of targeting is, in principle, a powerful way of generating cost-effective traffic in a competitive marketplace, yet overcoming the current limitations of the technique could be a major undertaking. However, if an effective targeting system is implemented in the future, the main search engines could easily establish themselves as a highly effective form of localised advertising.

If you’d like to know more about targeting your business to a geographical area on the search engines, please contact us for more details.

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