How to Target Country Specific Website Traffic

I have shared lots of ways to drive traffic to your website, but we all know there are few countries like U.S, U.K traffic converts better in terms of advertising & affiliate sales, because of purchasing power of users from these countries. There are many factors which help you to get country specific traffic.I could actually work on targeting U.S based traffic, but over the time when ever I iterate my blog business plan, I make changes in target audience. And realize, it’s better to target Indian specific audience, because of less competition and moreover, demand:supply ratio.

Now, this is my case, but I’m sure many of you who are blogging for Adsense income , you might want to target traffic from specific countries, and here are few things which you could do to improve the traffic from your target country. There is always one easy solution of buying country specific traffic, which works in the case of commercial sites, E-commerce sits, but for a blog, going natural is the best way.

Driving Country specific traffic:

Domain Name:

Top level domain extensions like .com, .org usually rank higher on global search engines, but to make your blog or website target to specific country, buying country specific domain is always a good idea. If you would notice, most of Aussie bloggers are using .au domain extension, and they rank pretty high in australian Google search. Similarly for India, you can target .in or .co.in, For U.K. traffic, grab a .co.uk domain extension.
To preserve your brand, also buy other TLD’S like .com, .org.  One major disadvantage of this idea is, you will find it very hard to rank on other country specific search engines, but if your goal is clear, and you know your target audience, country specific domain extension is your best bet. Here you can
find a list of genetic TLD’s. You can buy domain from  Godaddy .

Google Webmaster tool Geotargeting:

Google Webmaster tool, which is a free tool from Google for bloggers and webmasters is going to be very helpful in this case. You can set which country your Website is targeted to, and this will help you to get traffic from your targeted country. Login and verify your Website in Google webmaster tool, and under configurations > Settings you can specify which country you wish to target.
You can learn more about geotargeting your website from this video:

Webhosting Server location:

One of the another big factor in driving geotargeted traffic is your server location. If your target country traffic is U.S., a good idea should be host your website in U.S. based servers. If your target traffic is Australia, host your website in Australia.

• U.S. based servers: Bluehost, Knownhost, Linode, Cloudways

Other factors like CDN, does helps in speeding up your Website in different countries, but to stay focused on your target traffic, host your website in target country hosting only. This will not only ensure that your website will load faster in that country, also due to server I.P. search engines bots can determine the location of your server, and help you in ranking higher in particular country.

Backlinks:

When Google search was launched, they used the backlinks to determine the popularity of the content. A lot has change over the time, but importance of backlinks remain the same. A good strategy here would be, target country specific backlinks. For example, if your target audience is in U.K., try to get more backlinks from U.K. based websites. You can use Alexa to find a list of popular website in particular country, or find domains with country specific domain names. This particular strategy is prove to be most efficient, when you want to target traffic from specific country.
You can drive country based back links using Guest blogging or via blog commenting. Both the methods are proven and Penguin safe, if done in the right way.

Content level targeting:

Your content is the main signal which Google uses to determine which country you are targeting. If you are targeting multiple country with your generic domain name extension (.com, .org), add the country name in your post meta title, and description. This will not only make your content more keyword targeted, but also give a clear signal for the country you are targeting.
More over, the kind of content, language you are using in your article, also determine the ranking of your website. We all know readability is a known SEO factor, and if your language is more U.K. standard, targeting U.S. traffic will be tough. Make sure you improve your language for country specific language, or hire writers from the specific country.

Local SEO using Google places:

This may not apply to a blog, but if you are running a service blog or an E-commerce website, Google places is going to be very handy. Claim your business in Google places, and add all related informations like address, phone number which will help Google to determine the business location of your business. You can also create social media profiles on various websites, and fill out the information which will help to get more local citation, to push your country specific traffic. You can try Knowem, which I mentioned earlier to check availability of social media profiles.

Submit your website in local search and directories:

Earlier I have shared places to submit your website, which are targeted to global audience. For country based traffic, you should submit your website to local search engines, and local web-directories. Specially, later one of very useful to get country specific backlink, which will be one big factor in determining your geo-location traffic.

Use Google trends to see keyword popularity:

As I mentioned above, you should target content based on keywords which are popular in specific country. For example, this keyword 160by2, is very popular in India, and not in the rest of the world. Similarly, try to find keywords which are popular in your target country audience, and craft a content strategy based on that. For example, most of the time iPhone blogs will have large chunk of traffic from U.S. or U.K, as iPhone is more popular there, in compare to Asian countries.

Track keyword progress in country specific searches:

So far, you have applied above techniques to target your website traffic for specific countries, now keep a track of keyword progress in your target country. This will help you to find out which strategy is working, and which one is not. The one which works great, you can quickly start pushing that strategy to next level. You can use Alexa or SEMRUSh to check keyword ranking in particular country.
When ever you are writing business plan for your blog, targeted country should be in the top of your priority list, as it will also help you in planning your content marketing and guest blogging campaign.
Do let me know if you follow any other methods to target website traffic for particular country? If you find this article useful, do consider sharing it on Facebook and Google plus.