Are detecting the location of a users IP address and then redirecting them? Or perhaps you are just considering it?
In this video, we cover the topic and tell you what to watch out for when detecting UP location and serving redirects for SEO.
Transcription Should You Use IP Location Detection And Redirects? (Good Or Bad For SEO?)
Hi there, I’m John Lincoln with ignite visibility and today I’m talking to you about kind of an advanced SEO topic and that is location detection and SEO. It actually bleeds over into a lot of different aspects of conversion rate optimization and digital marketing. It can be really, really successful as far as increasing sales or driving leads but you got to know how to do it right. So that’s what we’re going to cover today. [Music] What is location detection? It’s basically when you detect somebody’s IP address in the location that they’re coming in from and then as a result of that, you push them to a specific area of your website. And why would you want to do that? Think about– if you have somebody coming in from California, you might have a section of your website that’s specific to California that people are going to enjoy that content more. This happens a lot on directory websites. This happens a lot on certain e-commerce sites. It happens a lot on large travel sites and things like that. People also use auto location detection not only to push you to a certain area of the site but also to populate certain information on the page. For instance, if I go to a site like Expedia they might detect that I’m in San Diego. I might be flying out from San Diego.
They could potentially auto populate things like that. Not 100% sure they do that on that site but they do have some pretty advanced features so they may. Here’s my point, location detection has a lot of implications and here are some things that I want you to know. Number one; if you’re using location-detection, make sure that you don’t do it incorrectly from a technical perspective. One of the big errors that I see is a lot of people will detect the location. They’ll push you to an area where you’ve got URLs that are not the main cleaned URL that you want to have. For example, you might want to have example.com/state/city opposed to something like example.com and a whole bunch of random URL parameters that will actually confuse Google quite a bit. That’s really important in that you want to make sure that you keep your URLs clean. Item number two; when you’re serving the content on the page. If you’re going to be serving location specific content, it’s best that you do that on a location specific page. So what you don’t want to do is detect the location and then push them to a page, that’s a general page and then serve up content on that page that’s specific to the location that they came in from.
If you do this what can happen is Google can pick that up and then they can look at this general page that you might be trying to have rank for a huge term and they can index it and index the location content that’s specific to your location. You don’t want you know your national page to have terms for something like San Diego on it or terms for something like Las Vegas on it because that will make it so it could only potentially rank in one area. Number three; watch your internal linking and make sure that the location detection doesn’t influence anything like that because that is kind of a common issue that occurs as well and overall you’ll see a theme with all of these things. Keep the pages clean. You can use location detection but make sure that you use it to push people to a version of the page that doesn’t change, that’s clean; that’s the same thing that you want Google to see, as the user to see and if you can do that you’re going to have success. Those are the basics of IP detection and location detection and pushing people to certain areas of your site today; kind of a mouthful. It’s actually a really good thing to do if you do it correctly. If you do it incorrectly, it can be devastating as far as ranking and Google can cause some major, major issues. I hope you learned something here today. Keep that site structure clean and I can’t wait to see you for the next ignite visibility in the University. [Music]
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