How to Assess Your Geo-Containment Level

In our last article, we discussed Geo-containment and its relevance to all businesses. In this article, we’ll cover how SEO and content teams can join forces to start an effective and sustainable Geo-containment program and, most importantly, how to build and manage knowledge in that field.

Assessing Data and Comparing Pages

The first step to containing our site geo is to assess the percentage of organic traffic coming from the geo-targeted area. This can be easily checked with Google Analytics or any other analytics tool.

Next, we assess the quality of our geo-contained traffic. To do this, we look at metrics that reflect visitor engagement levels – bounce rate, average time on site, and average pages per session.

With that data in hand, we can identify “winning” and “losing” pages. While comparing these pages, look at what makes them different from both a content marketing and an SEO perspective. Pay attention to which keywords the successful pages are ranking for and the geo-targeted location.

What SEO elements could be responsible for this success?

What about the content marketing perspective? Are these successful pages clear on the value they present to the audience? Do they speak to this audience? What’s the tone and style used in them?

Remember, looking at the losing pages is also valuable. As an example, elements we find on both winning and losing pages are potentially of low importance. Those we find only on winning pages are great candidates for elements of successful geo-containment.

The most important point is to come out of this analysis with a list of suspect geo-containment success factors. Why suspect? Because our next step is to duplicate these success factors into new pages (or to revise losing pages) and monitor their performance.

Documenting Findings and Managing Knowledge

Once we’re able to duplicate it, we should start compiling a list of important elements for geo-containment for the audience of that geo-targeted area. It’s important to understand that what works for one combination of audience and geo may not work for another.

For that reason, it’s important we consistently document and archive all our findings and conclusions from both the SEO and the content teams. We should look at geo-containment as a new Internet marketing field — one that requires collaborative group work by the content marketing and SEO teams. It’s a new knowledge field we need to engage with and constantly increase our understanding of.

In our next article, Geo-Containment: Practice and Examples, we’ll take a look at what a good and a bad example of Geo-containment looks like on Google Analytics and share some tips on how to improve it for our site.

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