Geotargeting your site in WMT

[olly]

Has anybody had any experience with this new feature in WMT? To refresh, if one goes to "Site configuration > Settings" you will notice an option to specify what users your site targets.

Specifically would it help increase your rankings in a particular region? About 75% of our visitors are local so this could provide a nice competitive advantage. At the same time one would not want to hinder the other 25% of international users visiting the sites.

I would presume that Google is intelligent enough (and would apply this knowledge) to know the geographic market a well trafficked site would be targeting, but I'd be interested to hear any feedback you guys have?

[tedster]

one would not want to hinder the other 25% of international users visiting the sites.

It's supposed to work the way you hope. It's supposed to help your rankings in "Country" when people search for "Widgets" and limit the scope of the search to "Country" - and do that without hurting other rankings.

If your site targets users in a particular geographic location, you can use our geographic target tool to provide us with information that will help us determine how your site appears in our search results, and also improve our search results for geographic queries. This data supplements our existing information, and setting a geographic target won't impact your appearance in search results unless a user limits the scope of the search to a certain country.

[google.com...]

However, some members here have reported seeing the non-country traffic fall off when they set a target - that was about a year back. I can't vouch for the accuracy of those reports, however, and I haven't seen anything like that lately.