Over the last few years, website owners have been facing issues while specifying targeted geo location of their website. They have been previously relying on I.P address of web hosting or using country specific domains. This feature will help website owners to specify their target geographical location for their website, or sub-domains.

Suppose, your business is based in Netherlands, but your website is hosted in US. This could result in seo ranking issues, since your website will score higher rankings within Google.com (US), rather than Google.nl (Netherlands).

This tool is accessible within Google’s Webmaster Tool as shown below:-

SEO HAWK Advice: Google has a separate webmaster tool section accessible at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. You need to first create an XML sitemap, and then submit it to Google. Webmaster Tool section requires you to submit your XML sitemap first. Read more about Google’s XML Sitemap : https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html
Q. If I specify my targeted geographic location as US, will this result in lower rankings worldwide?. I am currently receiving good traffic from UK, and other regions.

SEO HAWK Advice: This tool has been launched recently, and website owners/seo companies are still gauging the real effectiveness of this tool.

If your website is meant for worldwide audience, then we would never recommend you to restrict your website within one particular geo location.

Q. I am having a .com domain, and this site is hosted in US. My target location is London. Is this tool helpful for me?

SEO HAWK Advice: Yes, you can specify Country, or a specific City/Location using Google’s Geographic Targeting Tool.

However, this tool will have no effect if you try to move country specific domains out of their pre-defined geo locations ( co.uk implies UK domain). A country specific domain like .co.uk, or .com.au is meant for UK, and Australia search results respectively. Google geo targeting will not allow you to move pre-defined locations for country specific domains.

Q. Can I specify multiple targeted locations for my website?

SEO HAWK Advice: Sorry, that feature is not available yet. Google’s geographic targeting feature allows you to target only one specific location for any single domain.

However sub-domains of your main domain (other than country specific TLD’s ) can be used to target different geographic locations around the globe.