Regional website promotion

During information search Internet users quite often need information which has to do with a certain geographical region. For example, when Kyiv citizens enter such search query as “pizza delivery” they most likely need the list of companies which provide such services in Kyiv (but not in Odessa or Dnepropetrovsk, for example). Taking into account the peculiarities of such search is the basis of regional website promotion.

Search engines have learned to provide users with the so-called geo-dependent search results long ago. Search engines determine location of the user by the IP address of his computer. Sometimes user himself states the region in the special field so his location is evident for the search engine. Websites which are located in the same region as the user is will have higher priority in the search engine results page. The search query proper may not contain evident keywords which indicate the search region.

Regional website promotion permits to attract target visitors from certain regions to a website. It helps to increase conversion of the site visitors into customers and clients. That is why regional website promotion should be obligatory included into the set of website promotion measures.

For instance, regional location of a site in Yandex is determined by its IP address and the address stated on the “Contacts” page of the site. However the most reliable way to assign a needed region to the site is to set the region of the site in Yandex.Webmaster. For this purpose you should register your site in Yandex.Webmaster and fill in a special form “Region” in the section “Site geography”. You are allowed to state only one region for your site. Administration of Yandex advises that you should state the region of your site as precisely as possible.

You can also assign necessary region to your site in Google with the help of “Webmaster tools” but it is limited by a country and not by a separate region or city. If the region of the site is not assigned with the help of “Webmaster tools” (you should choose the option “Geographical targeting” in the section “Site configuration”) it will be automatically defined by its IP address or by the name of the regional domain of the site (such zones as .ru, .ua, .us, .uk, .de etc).

Regional website promotion is not limited by assignment of needed regional settings to the site only. You should pay special attention to the regional component in the site content too. Textual materials should contain evident indication of the country, region or city for the users of which this site is intended.

Regional website promotions includes the use of keywords which toponyms. A toponym is the name of a necessary settlement. You should also take into account regionality of the users' queries during selection of keywords for regional website promotion. Regionality is the ratio of the query frequency in a certain region to the total number of queries from this region.

For instance, Yandex keywords statistics tool (wordstat) provides an opportunity to learn regional popularity of a certain search query. For this purpose you should select keywords search “by regions” where the results of regional popularity of the sought-for query will be shown with different degree of detail (towns, regions etc).

Thereby regional website promotion is an excellent method of promoting websites of companies which conduct their business in a certain region. If regional “connection” of a site is adjusted properly this site will he higher in the search engine results page by geo-dependent queries other things being equal.

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regional promotion, regional website promotion, website promotion, regional site binding