When launching a website, it is important to identify where your target audience is located and to ensure that you get found within that region. For example, if you were an e-commerce store in Australia where you only shipped goods locally and not internationally, your target customers would be Australians and hence why it is important for you to localise your website to the local search engines.
The reason for this is whenever a user types in Google.com or Yahoo.com into their browser, these search engines will redirect them to the localised search engines based on IP detection. This means that if you’re browsing from Australia and you type in Google.com, you will be redirected to Google.com.au and for Yahoo.com, au.Yahoo.com. Once you’re at these localised search engines, you have the option of choosing local search results only.
This means that if you are found on these localised search results, the organic traffic that you will be getting highly qualified. This is a win-win for both search engines and website owners as search engines are serving more relevant search results, thus better quality and website owners are receiving relevant localised traffic. It’s all about relevancy!
Now you know the importance of localisation (or geo-targeting), here’s some common factors that search engines look for and factors specific to the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo).
