Geo Focussing

Your audience are worldwide, but why cater for everyone in one site?

Instead of creating multiple sites to target one country (geo targetting), instead provide seperate areas of your site so people can choose either a country-focussed area, or a general site.

Let’s call this Geo Focussing.

The internet. It’s a large space. And a potentially large audience to try and cater to. You have a number of choices:

1. Choose to target one geographical area only (by, say, having a purely US-focussed site);

2. Choose to keep your site open to everyone, with no country definitions being made;

3. Have the best of both worlds - geo-focus.

Let’s pick an example - say, a site that reviews mobile/cell phones and carriers.

Simply by choosing that as a market, you’re already facing boundaries - namely that carriers very rarely operate outside of the countries they’re positioned in (unless they’re a worldwide company, such as Vodafone). If you decide to focus on US-based carriers (because you live in the USA), then your audience is defined: US-based users, or people living abroad but with an interest in US-based carriers (because, for example, they’re planning on visiting or moving to the USA).

Sure - the market is huge! There’s a multitude of wireless networks, and millions of users who could be using your site. But you’ve locked yourself in. You’re focussing on US-based networks, so typically you can only really focus on PHONES that are available to US-based consumers. While you could feature phones available overseas, your US users aren’t really going to be bothered, are they?

Well, you develop your site, and you’re getting plenty of traffic for your US-only website. But you’re also getting hits from the UK, Europe, Japan, Australia. Wasted hits - because the majority of them, while they can browse your phone reviews, are missing out on the benefit of wireless carrier news and reviews.

So back up a few steps.

Back to the original idea: a site catering to mobile/cell phones and carriers.

What is common to everyone? Phones.

What is specifically regional? The networks/carriers.

There you have your divide. And it can be a great benefit for you.

The phone reviews are going to be the core of the site, holding it together - and we’re going to run branches from this core for each geographical market you’re wanting to carry.

We will have 1 branch for US-based users. Another for the UK, another for Europe (and even specifics within that: Netherlands, Germany, France), Australia, Japan. You get the picture.

Those branches are going to consisit of:

1. Phone reviews
These will be available across the entire site, but they will also be marked by the region they’re available in for retail.

2. Network/carrier reviews
These will be region specific. Those carriers who operate in multiple regions will have a centralised area with geo-focussed reviews on their page.

3. Language preferences for each area
Even if it is purely for navigation and set site-wide text elements to begin with.

So, how will this operate?

When the user first visits the site, he will be met with an Options page.

“Where would you like to go?”

Here we’ll have the country by country/region by region breakdown, offering him the dedicated branches to explore. Or, a ‘Go directly to Cell Review Central’. This will be a page with the whole shebang: all reviews, all carriers, defined by region and other criteria (which you can decide for yourself!).

Whatever option the user decides on this visit will be set by a cookie as his chief preference (he can always change it later), so that when he returns to the site his preference will be remembered.

So, Will You Geo Focus?

This is just a brief idea of how you can open an otherwise region-specific site to an entirely new audience. Can your site do with something like this?

I bet it can.

Originally posted here:
http://www.whichcommunity.com/archiv...geo-focussing/

very good article, I always focus on the American economy because that is the only thing I know. You are right, the focus is the key.

I also largely focus on the US because it is the only thing I know, but I have noticed a steadily increasing amount of traffic coming from the United Arab Emirates in the past few months. Has anyone else noticed this?

no, but that is nice, the UAE is a very wealthy country. Probably get traffic of worth from them.