Google geo targetting - could it work better for you ?

[Whitey]

I just thought I'd throw a line out here on geo targeting via WMT to see how it's working and not working for you.

From my point of view it's frustrating that you can only set one region , when the information we promote can have a multi regional audience , albeit not global. The option to target many more geographic zones would be useful.

Does geo targetting work for you and how could Google improve this ?

[tedster]

I'd like to see targeting by language groups - English, French, Spanish and Portuguese in particular. I know they "think" they have this handled, but having the option in Webmaster Tools to make it explicit could be a real help.

[dstiles]

It's not good for a lot of global sites. The idea of TLDs was to say where you were trading FROM, not what clientele base you were catering TO. The TO should be taken care of by the first two initials of WWW, possibly modified by something like meta = list-of-countries (didn't there used to be one of these floating around?).

Travel sites are obviously something that requires global traffic but it's poorly worked out by google, who think that a UK-based site could never want customers from the rest of the world - which, in fact, many desperately do.

This seems to have eased up a bit but possibly that's because google are returning results based on where my IP is based rather than on me using the US tag in searches.

In the UK there are two options given beneath the Search field: Web and UK. The Web option sometimes comes up with results matching my US search attempts but not always. UK returns results that are not always UK-centred. So it only partially works anyway.

What google SHOULD do is add a drop-down to the site offering a selection from all major countries or World - an expansion on the UK site options. For large countries such as US there could be a secondary one for region.

Apart from that, what's wrong with what I have always done in any case - add my town and country into the search box itself? Or are today's searchers not up to that level of thinking?