Geo-targeting is the most exciting way to reach local audiences on the Internet. It is becoming an increasingly valuable tool for national markets as they look for ways to tailor their messages and offers to consumers living in different geographical areas. Businesses focusing solely on limited geographical locations are looking to geo-targeting in order to help them to issue messages and offers to customers in their local areas with no waste of advertising dollars for areas not of interest. It can be defined as the capability to target potential customers by geographical location and it is also known as “localized online advertising”.
Geo-targeting will give you the capability to send ads only to the clients that live in selected geographic locations; it enables you to display your ads to potential customers located or interested in particular geographical areas within the market selected for your account. It gives you the opportunity to promote your business to a local audience and consumers within the entire market.
Basically geo-targeting is a method to regionalize ads on websites, cashing in on people in certain areas with certain available goods. It gives advertisers better value for inventory and boosts revenue streams by better targeting ads. This approach enables advertisers to target users based on their geographical location, to serve customers regionally and to increase brand/product awareness levels in specific geographical area. The advantage of the Pay Per Click search engine that offers geographical targeting is that it provides targeted visitors to advertisers willing to invest the extra dollar for qualified prospects.
Advertisers benefit from this model by using keywords containing the name of the specific geographical region. Putting the name of your geographic region into the title or description of your listing also increases your return on investment. The geo-targeting approach targets advertisements geographically based on:
Geo-targeting can be helpful for:
Online advertising reaches everyone in the world with access to a website. If your business would like to run an advertising campaign targeted to a specific region, geo-targeting; a way to geographically localize advertisements, can be the answer.
Source: Emilia Akulenko’s Weblog
I agree. Businesses marketing online sometimes forget the fact that its always start to promote locally by taking advantage of geo-targetting. You can go international later and hit more competitive words but local keywords are good for now and will give you tons of traffic if compounded with other variation of the terms.