How To Change Website Content Based On Visitor Geo Location (Country, State or City)

(No Tech Knowledge Required!)
geo content
5 minutes

Changing website content based on a visitor's geo location (country, state or city) is known as geo targeting and the primary purpose of doing this is to show content that is relevant to visitor's location.

Lets take an example:

Let’s assume that you’re a electronics retailer who generates a good bulk of their revenue through their eCommerce store. Assuming you’re serving clients from across the world (not just in the US!), what do you think would be the most effective strategy?

A) Having a single, static website that serves the same content to all your users, or

B) Having a dynamic website that displays different prices, currencies, and shipping policies based on where your users are located?

If you answered B, then congrats - you’re on the right track!

Why change website content based on visitor location?

Showing location relevant content to a visitor has multiple advantages:

  • Location relevant content increases trust as a visitor knows your business is located near them or delivers to their area
  • Location relevant content can catch a visitor's attention quickly. This reduces the chance of a visitor leaving your site and in turn increases conversions
  • In some cases, legally it may be required to show content based on a visitors country or state

How to change website content based on visitor location?

There are two ways to approach location relevant content targeting and it depends on the amount of content that needs to change.

Small amount of content

When you only require a small amount of content to change, for example a phone number, address or some text, you can get away with dynamically changing content in the same page using our Geo Content service.

Large amounts of content

When you have a large amount of content that needs to change, for example displaying different products, currencies, full page text, navigation, etc a better approach is to use unique location specific pages or even separate websites targeted to each location. You can then make use of our Geo Redirect service to route traffic to the correct page or website based on their location.

Geo Content

Geo Content lets you dynamically modify a piece of content in a page based on a visitor's location.

Advantages

  • easy to manage when only a small amount of content needs to be changed
  • less work required duplicate pages are not required

Disadvantages

  • needs some amount of html and css coding knowledge
  • may be hard to implement if your CMS platform doesn't allow you to modify html
  • not SEO friendly as crawlers may not detect dynamic content
  • may not support complex content that is generated dynamically e.g. product grids

Quick start guides

Geo Redirect

Geo Redirect lets you route visitors to a location relevant page or website based on their location. We strongly recommend going down the route of having location specific pages or websites and routing traffic to the correct page/site based on visitor location. This is a better long term approach of managing multi-location sites in terms of trust and SEO.

Advantages

  • no coding required
  • having location specific pages or websites is the ideal strategy for SEO
  • easy to manage content in each page or site
  • works with all websites / CMS

Disadvantages

  • need to maintain multiple pages or websites

Quick start guides

E-commerce location based content targeting

If you are running a ecommerce store and need to show products, prices and content based on a visitor's country, then the best approach is to create separate stores and route traffic to the correct store based on their location.

Check out our guide For Multi-Country E-commerce Stores

Use Cases

1. Streamline information

Many eCommerce store owners will make the mistake of trying to build a single site that addresses the concerns of all their different target segments. Unfortunately, these folks often end up with a website that has too much going on at once.

We’re talking multiple messages, offers and Calls-To-Actions (CTA), which leads to a cognitive overload on your visitor’s part. What does your visitor end up doing? They close the browser, and churn forever.

The bottom line? Your website has to contain just the right amount of information - enough so that your visitor can confidently make a purchase, but not so much to the point where it gets overwhelming or confusing. That’s why it’s important to add geo content, which changes based on visitor location, to cater to individual users!

2. Make checkout easier

On top of that, you’ll also want to display prices in your visitor’s home currency, and offer their preferred payment options during checkout. This way, you minimize the friction associated with buying a product, and increase the chances of your visitor going ahead and completing their purchase.

3. Show targeted offers

Most eCommerce stores run regular promotions and offers which coincide with holidays and festivals. But here’s the thing: if you’re serving a customer who’s in New Zealand or Australia, then running a Fourth Of July sale doesn’t really make much sense. In order to localize your offers and promotions, you’ll have to customize content based on visitor geolocation.

Some eCommerce store owners might argue that a sale is a sale, and at the end of the day, no one’s going to say no to a discount. This might be true, but you should also consider the other implications that your promotional strategy brings about.

Say you’re an Australian who’s looking at this store which obviously caters to a US audience, for example. If the prices are really that competitive, then sure - you might go ahead and purchase a hard drive or two from them. But when it comes to buying laptops for your entire team, you’d probably give this site a miss, and look for another retailer instead. After all, you’re not sure whether this company would be able to provide you with the necessary customer support, given that they’re based somewhere else.

That’s all there is to it! You’ve now successfully set up your dynamic content, and your website will now display content based on visitor IP address. All there’s left to do is sit back and wait for your conversion rates to soar through the roof.

Geo Targetly

Geo Targetly is a simple, plug-and-play tool that lets you redirect visitors and change website content based on visitor location. To start serving your visitors geo content based on their IP address, claim your free trial now!

Author
2nd April 2019

Real stories of geo-targeting impact

William D.

Small Business

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Feb 26, 2024

An Incredibly Handy Tool for Your International Customers

Geo targetly allows us to redirect our international customer to specific pages and make sure that they can get the right UX. It is very helpful when you have like us different currency to manage. Also it is very easy to implement on your Webflow website.

Michal C.

Entrepreneur

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Aug 15, 2024

Geo Targetly Is a Great Option for My Multiple Shopify Sites

@GeoTargetly - Love this tool for global e-commerce redirects. I use it on several Shopify sites and love it. You can use one link and send people to different links based on their location and a ton of other stuff too.
#globalecom #ecommerce #shopifystore

Cheryl T.

Marketer

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Oct 4, 2021

It Is Very Easy to Use On Wix - the Help Articles Were Useful

We wanted to be able to segment certain landing pages for certain geographical locations and using the redirect page especially for our pricing pages was extremely helpful in helping us achieve this task. It has allowed us to target certain landing pages effectively.

Mainak G.

Psychologist

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Nov 28, 2023

A Game Changer For Global Business

As the backbone of our emerging global approach, Geo targetly has been holding our back. It's hassle free, they transform your website in the most appropriate ways for different countries, tribes, localities. Besides top notch features customer support is amazing.

Chris T.

Managing Director

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Jan 12, 2021

"Geo Redirects Made Easy" - Great Tool And Very Attentive Support

I really liked how easy it was to integrate the geo redirects into our Shopify website with a single block of code. The user interface also made it simple to define our business rules with regard to how we want users to be directed around our 3 sites.

Daan D.

Digital Marketing Manager

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Oct 4, 2021

We Have Seen a Great Increase In Our Traffic

Very easy to set up and run. We use Geo Targetly to set up redirections for our specific geo based versions of our website. We have seen a great increase in our traffic and it has been a helpful addition to our tool stack. It's very useful and does what it says.

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