Ways to Prevent Your Website From Showing to Users in Irrelevant Areas

In the SEO world, site owners face a lot of problems – from optimizing their websites to producing engaging content. However, sometimes SEOs also encounter issues where their web page(s) ranks very well, but the traffic it brings in is not really relevant to their local business. Every site owner loves getting traffic, but it can get frustrating when it is irrelevant to your business.

While it is impossible to tell whether that particular page is harming or helping the rest of your website in the search results without knowing the whole situation specifically, there are a few ways to prevent your site from showing to users in irrelevant areas.

However, be careful before you take any step, as it may result in a few unwanted side effects. Take the time to analyze your whole website and its search performance, and then decide whether or not you should go ahead with these methods.

Clearly State Your “Area Served”

The first thing you need to do is check your schema markup and claim the “area served” feature.

From there, you can make it clear what city, town, district, or country your business serves, which will act as an indication to the search engines that this is the specific region for which your content or services are relevant.

After that, sign in to your Google My Business account and update your information with the same location and ‘area served.’

Assess Your Copy

Check if your copy is localized for your particular area or not? If it isn’t, then do you think you can adjust your phrasing a little bit in order to clarify that your business is offering services only for the customers within your area?

You can also try and focus on local talking points within your business domain. It can be anything from a local holiday celebration to crucial landmarks such as a statue in the neighborhood.

For instance, if your business is located in Miami and you are talking about Christmas, you don’t need to mention what’s happening in Manhattan, Los Angeles, or Chicago. Forget about what special is happening over there for Christmas eve and instead focus on what’s happening within your service area.

Everybody knows about the grand celebrations of Manhattan, but your target audience knows about the local events taking place.

Next, go ahead and check out the lesser evaluated sections of your website, like the footer.

When we talk about the website copy, it also comprises the content in your footer and the local info present in the body sections of other pages such as the homepage or contact page.

You need to ensure that all the pages on your website, wherever you have mentioned location contains your correct local contact numbers, street address, emails, and interactive maps.

Providing such detailed and accurate contact information helps the site visitors get in touch with you quickly and get your services.

The Drawback of Localizing Your Pages

Now, this brings us to the drawback of doing all this.

As we mentioned earlier that you should be careful while choosing to implement such ways as they might negatively impact or have unpleasant side effects.

While localizing your web pages, there is a chance that you may end up harming your national or international search rankings.

Every small business is established with the aim to grow, and some even want to expand their business overseas. But in the future, if you want to sell, expand, or join companies, you might not be able to regain that traffic.

Moreover, with your pages ranking outside of just your local region, it might also be fetching organic backlinks to your website.

Plus, if your service page contains internal links, then the shortage of new links might lead to everything starting to decrease since your website will be no longer obtaining natural backlinks that pass authority.

So, when your business runs into a problem like this, instead of trying to block or discard that irrelevant traffic, you can try to monetize it and adjust your business with it.

You can also try and grow an audience for newsletters, podcasts, webinars, and other communications to help your business expand and flourish. Moreover, such subscribers and audience can also help you get PR opportunities and cross-promotions, which will again help escalate your business.

Conclusion

Getting traffic outside of your service area does not necessarily have to be a negative thing. How you utilize that traffic counts.

Therefore, give some thought to it before you decide to get rid of that ‘irrelevant traffic.’ And bear in mind, once you localize your pages and successfully eliminate that traffic, there is a good chance that you may never get it back in the future even if you want to.

However, if you still wish to go ahead with it, you know how to do it now. Just implement the steps discussed in this article.