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
Search engine marketers and usability engineers want to understand why we go to websites and what we do after we arrive at a search results page. They ask questions like:
- Are we satisfied with where we landed?
- Did the engine provide accurate results listings?
- Was our click choice a positive one?
- Did we stay on the site or leave?
- If we left, what search result better matched what we wanted to find?
- Was it the search results or did we have a bad experience with the web page we landed on?
Both search engines and human factors related fields study our intent.
Author Matt Bailey points to the depth of the importance of intent in his new book, Internet Marketing: An Hour a Day.
“Search engines are integrating more multimedia and allowing deeper access to documents and media earlier in the search process. They are attempting to determine the intent of the searcher and deliver results accordingly.”
What is our intent? Why do we visit the Internet? Why do we use search sites such as Google and Youtube?
In a 2009 ComScore study (comScore, 2009), they found that “Nearly one out of every ten minutes a person spends online around the world is spent on a Google site.” This includes the search engine itself, Youtube, which they own, Google books, email, Google reader and more.
Clearly, marketers want to be sure their clients’ websites perform well in Google’s web properties. Not doing so can wreck the success of a business.
Search Behavior = People Who Search
Shortly after search engines and information sites appeared on the Internet, case studies zeroed in to understand why, who, where, when, where and how humans use them. Hot on the trail, too, were analysts interested in learning about site traffic, popularity, rank and how to make money from it.
Many of you were guinea pigs during the 1990’s when web page backgrounds were gray with black text, and animation, 3D images, scrolling text boxes, rotating banners and blinking images were all part of a typical user interface.
As fun as all those things were to create (I loved animating images), web designers had to buckle to user preferences.
Search engines learned what we really come to the Internet for. Perhaps search engine sites are not suitable for certain subject types when it comes to information searches. In order to improve search engine design and SEO marketing efforts, we try to understand user intent and goals for searching.
It’s been well established at this point that search engines are used by us to find information. What kinds of information are most popular?
A recent study from Australia on who uses search engines found that half of search engine queries were looking for a particular website, while the other 50% were split between ecommerce and popular culture searches.
The study also pointed to what is referred to as “leisure searches”. The findings present the idea of search sites not only for information gathering or shortcuts to web sites, but they’re also sources for leisure, with one in six of all searches estimated as being leisure searches.
The Australian study offered some surprising details for anyone wondering what we’re searching for, by subject. Adult site searches fell into the middle, with ecommerce being second, edged under a tad by popular culture topics. Health, weather, contemporary affairs and government are the least popular searches.
The study stood out from others because it included and factored in the lifestyle of their participants. This is different than user testing labs or Eye tracking tests. To their surprise, lifestyle choices had no measurable impact on the type of search queries. In fact, new questions were raised on user –searcher behavior.
For example, do Internet users tend to go to particular trusted web sites for information on healthcare, computing and contemporary affairs, rather than use search engines? Does the distribution of the most ranked subjects searched for represent user interests or the suitability of search engines for looking up certain types of topics?
Another study (Broder, 2002) narrows search engine user behavior as informational, navigational, transactional and leisure. Half the searches in the study were navigational and one-third, transactional. Half of all searchers know where they want to go.
What Does This Mean To Search Marketers?
The most obvious is that it’s time to accept usability studies into marketing strategy. And, user experience professionals can no longer devalue the role of search marketers. Both camps provide essential skills and expertise needed for web site projects.
A lot of what’s happening on the Internet is relationship building. The global community wants this so badly they invented social networking sites and social marketing to drive interest and generate revenue from these new site sources.
Emotional web design is no accident. We’re emotional beings. Empathy makes us connect with others.
“In life and business, focus on creating win-win situations. Look beyond the immediate sale in order to connect with customers as people.” – Steve Harper, The Ripple Effect.
Despite our developing mental models and creating user personas, we remain on the edge of understanding who uses our stuff. Wouldn’t it be grand if stakeholders got out of their offices and actually interacted with the people who use their websites?
I’ve often wished I could video people who multi-task at home, with one hand on a laundry basket, an ear to the cell phone and a hand reaching for the laptop nearby. What does that busy person search for and how? Can we make their experience less stressful?
Division between marketing and user experience will dissolve as both approaches discover they need each others’ data to do a better job for their clients.
There’s no question that a passion for usability and search engine marketing leads to their fascinating cousins, like information architecture, findability, captology, analytics and neurology. There’s also no question that money can be made by optimizing for and advertising in search engines.
Studying user behavior is a win-win for search engine technology, search marketing and website usability and human factors.
Cited Resources:
Broder 2002; A Taxonomy of Web Search (PDF)
Waller, Vivienne 2010; Not Just Information: Who Searches for What on the Search Engine Google?
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Related Topics: Just Behave
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Kevin Na set a new low Thursday for the worst par-4 hole in the PGA Tour record books, shooting a 15 to plummet to 10-over following a nightmarish sequence of shots.
Peter Risdon Says:
May 16, 2011 at 2:40 pm | Reply
The paragraph you quoted from ends with this sentence:
“According to the best-sited stations, the diurnal temperature range in the lower 48 states has no century-scale trend.”
That was a surprise given the tenor of this post: “… maybe this is the end to questions as to whether surface temperature increases actually exist.”
Did you mean that we can now say the answer to that is that surface temperature increases do not exist? Or that, pace Keenan in the WSJ, the data do not contain statistically significant trends?
andyrussell Says:
May 16, 2011 at 2:58 pm | Reply
I don’t think diurnal temperature range is very important. Do you?
What’s more, the “century-scale” bit covers some interesting detail. Before Fall et al., it seems that the only work on diurnal temperature range showed a negative trend from the mid-century to 1980s-ish. What Fall et al. found was that this has increased again since the 1980s. So there’s no “century-scale trend”.
But that tells you very little about mean surface temperature trends.
Mark Says:
May 17, 2011 at 10:45 pm
I have heard it claimed that the reduction in diurnal temperature range over the past few decades provides evidence that GHG increases are responsible for the warming. In that sense, some people think diurnal temperature range is important.
Incidentally, I don’t think Fall et al. were the first to find that DTR has increased since the 1980s. I read a paper that said much the same thing a few years ago.
Sorry for the lack of references to back up these statements. I’m a little too busy at the moment to chase them up.
andyrussell Says:
May 18, 2011 at 8:43 am
Ok, so I’m probably not giving DTR as much significance as it deserves.
My point is that I don’t really care about DTR. I don’t think I know anyone who has a particular interest in DTR. If this paper had been published by anyone else I wouldn’t have looked at it. It’s not very interesting. It’s just another paper on climate observations that fits in with the “consensus view of climate change” or however you want to put it. That’s useful, but not to me or most people.
If, however, the paper had shown what Watts has been saying it would show for quite a while now (i.e. that the postitive temperature trend in the surface station record in the US was an artefact of poor station siting) then that would have been very interesting. To me and to many other people.
But it didn’t.
Ben Says:
May 16, 2011 at 4:49 pm | Reply
So Peter… If the diurnal high and the diurnal low both rise by 1°C, you think this means there has been no warming? After-all, the diurnal range hasn’t changed! Others might draw a different conclusion.
Peter Risdon Says:
May 17, 2011 at 8:26 am | Reply
I understand diurnal range has significance, and the relationship between day and night time temperature ranges is important, especially with regard to the period 1950 to 1980 when the effect of man-made global warming, it has been argued, was masked by a cooling but revealed by the changes in the relationship between these ranges.
I further understand that this argument is based on the idea that human pollution caused this daytime cooling, that it affected the range of day time temperatures as well as the difference between night time temperatures which continued to show warming, and daytime ones that didn’t. This makes day time temperature range significant: if this is right it would be expected to show a variation that correlates with human activity.
But this isn’t my field; I’m just reading what I can in an attempt to understand as much as possible about an important issue and, for me at least, that means reading Watts and reading this blog. Just searching out stuff you’re already disposed to accept isn’t good enough. My comment was prompted by what struck me as a somewhat partial quotation and exasperation: I’m with Feynman when he said you should point out the problems with a theory, not just the things that support it.
[It's not really a "partial quotation" is it? That sentence you are interested in is stuck on the end of the abstract as a new paragraph and isn't really related to the 2 sentences I quote and which are related to the subject of this post. I'm not really interested in DTR and I doubt Watts was either. - AR]
At least Watts invites people with different views to post on his blog and has been at the forefront of attempts to cross the ideological divide, not least with Judith Curry.
Ben, of course you’re right. Andy, a century is an arbitrary scale, of course.
I’d still be interested in your take on statistical significance.
JMurphy Says:
May 17, 2011 at 12:05 pm | Reply
In what way has Watts atempted to cross “the ideological divide” ?
Ben Says:
May 17, 2011 at 3:16 pm | Reply
Peter, I encourage a critical (i.e. thoughtful) reading of Anthony’s blog but my god do you really think he’s “at the forefront of attempts to cross the ideological divide”? Anthony has done more to harden denialist thought than anyone, with the possible exception Marc Morano.
The “different views” he solicits are unthreatening fig-leaves.
andyrussell Says:
May 17, 2011 at 3:24 pm | Reply
I’ve got no problem with most of what Keenan says, although he’s not the first/only person to be saying these things. There’s a JoC paper from 2010 and it was one of the useful points to come out of the UEA email enquiries (i.e. working more with stats people). Not sure where the funding was supposed to come from for these new people though!
I suppose the bigger problem comes down to climate science covering so much stuff – you can’t just look at problems from a stats/dynamics/modelling/chemistry/radiation/whatever perspective for too long before a) not getting very far or b) needing to doing something you’ve not done before.
omnologos Says:
May 19, 2011 at 7:21 am | Reply
Am surprised nobody claimed it was irrelevant as the US only covers 2% of the globe…
andyrussell Says:
May 19, 2011 at 7:43 am | Reply
Maybe that’ll be Watts’ next move: if you can’t find anything in the US, let’s give Europe a go.
I can’t imagine there’d be much enthusiasm left for such a project, though.