Note the Client companies are based in either the US or Canada and the “percentage of traffic outside key service areas” are based on each client’s target market.
For instance, if a client only services the US only, any traffic outside the US would be traffic outside their service area.
Evaluating Your Own Traffic For Relevance
To use our own web design and Internet marketing business as an example, we service both Canada and the US, but were getting 24% of our traffic from other international countries. Big portions of that traffic were companies looking to sell their services to us.
These international visitors would fill in our web forms and call us to inquire, untimely skewing our website analytics data by not giving us a real understanding of how our website was performing to quality prospects.
A solution had to be implemented to significantly reduce the amount of resources we were dedicating to people outside our service areas.
Ultimately, we didn’t want to be contacted from people we couldn’t help. The four possible solutions we considered were:
- Create a custom report in Google Analytics to filter out the unwanted data (reporting related)
- Adjust the content of our website (website related)
- Block the traffic from specific Countries from viewing our website (server related)
- Don’t change anything.
Option #1
When evaluating the first solution, creating a custom report to filter out this data in Google Analytics, this would clear up our analytics data. Implementing a filter would provide a more realistic picture of quality prospects we could service in our geographic area instead of those prospects or solicitors in other counties we don’t service.
This option didn’t run the risk of blocking any traffic or robots that we do want. It’s also a simple filter to add in Google Analytics. We set up another Profile with the country exclusions filters. A new Profile was the preferred approach, rather than going through the extra steps of creating Custom Reports.
However, setting up analytical filters doesn’t fully resolve the issue, since these visitors could still access our site, fill in web forms, and contact us, ultimately wasting resources that we could dedicate elsewhere.
It wouldn’t give us a true picture of what was going on. It also wouldn’t resolve the problem – we didn’t want to be contacted by companies from some outside countries.
Option #2
Updating the website content to say you only service a specific area is another solution that we considered. This would inject more geo-targeted keywords into your site, which would help in local SEO. Adding a graphical map, drop-down options and/or links that allow the visitor to select their country would help qualify visitors.
Some of the downfalls of this option include spending a much higher amount of time to implement versus the other options. The success of this would also be dependent on how honest the visitor is.
Assuming visitors are reading your website content, adding geo-targeted keywords into your site would set a clearer expectation of service area delivery. However, this option still doesn’t resolve the issue of sharing contact information that allows unsolicited visitors to contact us and invalid web form data.
Option #3
How about blocking or filtering visitors automatically based on their IP address? When considering to block website visitors by IP it’s important to first evaluate the reliability of the IP address(es). The accuracy of an IP list is over 99.5% on a country level and 80% on a city level. The smaller the location, the less reliable the IP address.
Internet Service Providers change IP addresses they designate to customers. Some change them more frequently than others, which is why you want to keep the database of IPs updated. Scheduling a monthly update is typically a good routine if city level IP authentication is required. Country level is much more static.
The benefit of blocking the country via IP address would not only clean up analytical data, but also ensure our sales funnel was more efficient and provide a more accurate picture of real prospects in all systems. We needed to consider other issues in this approach.
One concern was the potential for a search crawler coming from an IP in the location we were planning on blocking. For example, there was a possibility that Google’s search crawler would also be blocked if it came from the same country. The implementation of this option is more technical. One would need to obtain a list of IP addresses for the desired locations and update the websites htaccess file.
In our example, the inquiries from some countries became so frequent that we couldn’t ignore it any longer. After much debate, we decided to ban the countries; however, we would only ban one at a time to evaluate the effects.
For instance, one of the largest traffic sources, accounting for approximately 20% of this, was from India, a market we don’t service. These Indian visitors were companies looking to sell their services to us.
We executed the ban in the polite Canadian way. We also implemented the Google Analytics profile with the country filter to monitor future website statistics versus the past.
Those visitors that came from our blocked list would land on a different page that displayed a nice message. It read: “Thank you for visiting. However, we don’t provide services in your area.”
In sum, the tests have gone over very well. Banning the country from our website has significantly cut down the number of unsolicited calls, emails and web form requests. It also gave us a much more accurate picture of how our website was performing within our own target market and service area.
Considerations For Blocking Traffic By Location
If you’re considering this strategy, some factors to consider when filtering visitors include:
- Why do you want to filter website traffic?
- Which locations would you want to filter?
- How much traffic do you currently get from locations outside your service area?
- How important is this traffic?
- How to funnel visitors outside your service areas?
- The accuracy of the IP addresses locations in mind.
- Effects of non-human visitors.
A few months after we implemented this, we received a direct mail package that contained pens with our logo on them from a company that wished to sell us branded pens.
Guess what it said under our logo? “Thank you for visiting. However, we don’t provide services in your area.” We had a good laugh. Someone obviously didn’t read what they printed. It was evidence that our website block was working and a nice souvenir.
The key takeaway, as always, is monitor your traffic and conversions. Track where your quality traffic is coming from and decide for yourself if you should block the traffic of certain countries. Make sure to proceed with caution to ensure that you are not missing some opportunities.
Think outside of the box for other ideas of how you can use that traffic. Perhaps referring the traffic to a partner or creating a unique service for specific markets is another option to consider.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Related Topics: 100% Organic - Search Engine Optimization Tips | SEO: General
The following is part of a multiple part series covering image optimization techniques. This article is intended for beginners through intermediate SEO’s; if this doesn’t pertain to you, you may want to skim as most of this will probably be review material for you.
Some of the big questions many people ask are why would they even want to perform image optimization? Doesn’t it just help people who want to steal or hotlink images? And is there really any meaningful traffic or links that you can get from image optimization? IMHO the answer is yes. Let’s say someone is going on a trip to Italy. They might do image searches for things to do or see in Italy and for famous Italian landmarks like the Leaning Tower of Piza, the Trevi Fountain, or St. Peter’s Basilica. Thanks to Google’s universal search results, images provide a way to get onto the first page (or, in some cases, the top result) and get a click through, an ad view, or adsense impression. It might even get a lead generation completion. Maybe you run a fish store. If a university professor or government agency needs a picture of a fish and your image result appears, and you allow your images to be reused in exchange for a link, this can be huge way to passively build links slowly over time (true story! It happened for a client I used to have). Now that we’ve got the why out of the way, let’s talk about the “how” of image optimization.
Filenames
This is one of the most basic elements of image optimization. If you have an image of blue widgets, I would name your image “blue-widgets.jpg” or “blue-widgets.gif”. You can use other formats like PNG, but I have gotten better results with “jpg” and “gif” files. You can use other characters like underscore as word delimiters, but I get better results with hyphens. You can run the words together if they are separate in other factors. I have found stemming plays a role (ie widget vs widgets), but you can get around it using other factors. I haven’t seen capitalization play a role, but I prefer to use all lower case because I usually use Apache servers and case sensitivity matters. If you are going to have multiple images of the same object-type, I suggest adding a “-1″, “-2″ onto the end.
Now, before the hate mail or hate tweets start, it is entirely possible to have an image rank without the keywords being in the file name–IF there are enough other factors in place. However, you should ask yourself why would you give up a chance to give a search engine a signal about what an image is about? If you work on a large ecommerce platform or other large database application, chances are good that your gold diamond earrings will have an image file name like “GDX347294.jpg” that corresponds to the item’s SKU or other internal classifier. So, yes, you will have to sacrifice the keyword for business reasons.
ALT Text
Let’s get the basic information out of the way: ALT text was designed for screen readers or visually-impaired people to know what they weren’t seeing. Your goal is to use it to satisfy the screen readers while being keyword focused enough for the search engines and without being a keyword stuffing spammer. Here’s an example of ALT text variations:
Keyword stuffed: discount hotel room paris france
ALT text only: Eiffel Tower
SEO optimized: Eiffel Tower from Louvre Bons Enfants hotel room
Striving to find a balance between pleasing the search engines and text readers can be a juggling act. If you are risky with some of your other SEO techniques, I’d play this on the safe side.
Headings and Bold Text
If image optimization for a particular image is important, I really like to optimize the image with bold or a heading tag of the term I’m chasing right above the image. I’ve found this really helps give a strong signal to the engines
i think image optimization is good for SEO journalist :)
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