Google Analytics allows you to view your visitors by their geographic location. You can see the countries, states, provinces, counties, and cities where your visitors were when they visited your website. This information is tracked according to the IP address of the person when they arrived on your site.A typical assumption of a retail store owner is that website visitors from outside the local area are of no interest to them, but that thinking needs to change as mobile devices become more important.
My own tracking statics show that mobile visitors account for 25% of all traffic to retail jewelry store websites. As the popularity of mobile web browsing grows, the exact geographic location of a website visitor won't matter as much as who the visitor is and why they are coming to your website. It might be more important for some people to find a retail jeweler nearby the areas they travel every day than finding one close to their home or job.
Every time a smartphone changes a cell tower, it has the chance to acquire a new IP address. If you see visitors from outside your typical target marketing areas it might be because mobile visitors are searching for jewelers in your town.
Geographic reports from Google Analytics will also show visitors from other countries. These visitors might not interest you at all if you don't have e-commerce set up on your website. Even if you do have e-commerce, you might not want customers from those other countries. If you have a high number of visitors from other countries that don't interest you then you might want to ask your SEO professional how to refocus your online efforts to a more local targeting.
Speaking of local targeting, one of the best ways to increase visitors from your local market is to write blog posts that include town names or popular locations for those target locations. Try including town names in the title of your blog posts, and include customer testimonials from people living in those towns.
Have you ever reviewed a sales report showing what towns the majority of your customers come from? That report should give you a clear indication of which towns you are currently targeting with your marketing. Want to increase sales to residence of towns not listed on that report? You could start by adding a few blog posts to your website which include those names in body of the blog and in the blog title.
Taking the time to review the geographic reports from Google Analytics should help you better understand the types of visitors that arrive at your site, and it will help you understand how you should be targeting people who are not yet visiting your site.
