How to set a website's regional affiliation in Google Search Console

Indication of regional affiliation is important in order to promote your website in the desired region, and not leave it at the discretion of search engines. Check out this article on how to find the region of the website in Google and change it.

How to select a website region in Google

To speed up getting into the search results in your region, you need to set it yourself. The regionality means that your web resource belongs to a specific country that the search engine defines, or that you set yourself.

Regional affiliation of the website is must-have for projects in which:

the host is registered in one country, and promotion occurs in another. For example, the host belongs to the US domain, but in fact, the website is for Russian-oriented audience;
top-level domain is neutral to geolocation (.com or .org).

You need to set the website region in Google through the Search Console. If you haven't yet registered your website there, make sure you do it in advance.

Go to the sidebar and select the Performance section in the side menu.

Search Traffic in the Google Search Console

Here we need to select International Targeting, as in the picture:

country and language targeting in the Google Search Console

In the new window go to the Country tab:

targeting by country using Google Search Console

Now you only need to choose the region where the website is promoted, that is, the location of your target audience. You can only choose a country.

First, check the box marked in the screenshot above. Immediately after this, the region button will become available. Set the desired country and save the result.

Select targeting in the Google Search Console

Thus, Google will consider your setting and display the website in the regional search results, which will facilitate its geographical search. If your project already has a regional zone, for example, .ru, you won't be able to change country settings, since the region of the website is already there.

Google My Business

There is another way to set regional settings in Google; you can do this through My Business tool. Using this resource, your website information will go to Google+, Google search and Google Maps.

Follow the link and fill in the data about your company:

Fill in your location:

Choose the most accurate description of your business:

Specify the contact information that will be displayed to users:

contact information in the Google My Business

You now need to confirm the settings, and that's it:

The more your profile will be complete, the more correctly the website will appear in the search engine. The website promotion will be marked by improved positions, which are displayed in a local ranking. Local results work in Google search and maps, its task is to help the user find the nearest cafe, office, and other location searched by the user.

Geolocation is predominantly enabled on mobile devices, which helps to personalize the result. That is, if you are looking for clothing stores using your smartphone, it is more likely that you will receive the nearby places in the search results.

Interregional websites

It's not so complicated to manage the website when it works with only one country. You just configure it according to the instructions above. But what to do when a web resource is designed to work with several countries? How to correctly determine the region to get to the desired search results?

You will need to use several methods for this type of websites. Set all offices on Google Maps. We can solve the problem by creating subdomains where you can assign a different region to each website.

Please note that subdomain websites should have only unique content and not duplicate each other. As a rule, such web resources are promoted separately. And finally, you can take advantage of multilingual websites. Correct configuration is also important.

Conclusion

It is necessary to specify the regional affiliation for websites that don't have a direct indication of the region in the domain name or registered by another country. These settings will let Google know what your website's regional audience is.

Any errors in region configuration settings may reduce the effectiveness of SEO promotion in a local ranking.

You can specify a website region in several ways:

Google Console;
My Business.

To set up a region, go to the Console panel, choose the performance section and select a country. My Business involves registration, which automatically transfers information about the region to the search systems.

For websites designed for several countries, this method will be ineffective.

Interregional websites are websites that work with several countries.

The following measures will help you to succeed in the interregional search results:

registering subdomains;
multilingual settings.

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