Local businesses will often do business with multiple cities and municipalities that are near enough to them where they can easily share customers. It’s fairly common for businesses to conduct businesses in the next town over, or accept clients from a few miles outside of their businesses city limits. However, now that many small businesses also have moved some services and operations online, there are considerations to be made with how those businesses treat visitors from other cities, towns, and municipalities.
The type of business that you operate will affect how you treat visitors from other cities. And Depending on where you are located, what services you offer, and other factors, there are a wide variety of reasons why you would talk to visitors from different cities with different messaging. Regulations, rules, and taxes commonly vary by city, which could add complexity to your bookkeeping if not properly handled. There are also issues with fleet and travel that need to be taken into account. Your business should be able to clearly show visitors what services you can provide to them in other cities.
If you’re serious about informing your customers and serving other cities and towns, you can’t go wrong with a geo redirection service, like Geo Targetly. This kind of service can provide you with redirect abilities that enable you to geo redirect on your website visitors location, in this case, what city where they live. In this article, we’ll discuss why it might be important for a business to redirect visitors by city, and how that can be set up.
What is geo redirection, how does it work?
Geolocation IP databases power geo redirection. These databases detect your visitor's location by using their IP address allowing you to use their IP address to detect where they are accessing your website, down to the city level. You can then specify IP redirects that will redirect visitors based on their geolocation.
Redirection like this enables you to create a redirect website version or page for each location for which you have unique messaging and or specific location information. When visitors see your website from this location, they will also see the messaging you have decided is best for the city that they are in. This redirection is also entirely accurate down to the city level, so you can be reasonably sure that your visitor's location, provided by the geolocation service, is correct.
Why should a business redirect visitors from different cities?
If this kind of service sounds useful to you, there is likely already use for it in your head. But in case you might not see an obvious use case for a service like this, we’ll go over a couple of examples that might help you see how a geolocation redirection service could be useful for directing users from different cities to different pages on your website.
An e-commerce business is one obvious example where redirection based on city makes a lot of sense. Serving multiple cities online with an e-commerce store (potentially with a local focus) means you might have different shipping requirements, and tax requirements based on the city to which you are shipping. If you allow items to be purchased nationwide, you likely have variable shipping rates for cities and towns close to you and within the same state. You likely accommodate for sales tax when handling orders online. And you probably already have a system in place that handles all of these things when dealing with purchases on the back end. But is in place to ensure that you display exact tax and shipping information to users? A redirection service like Geo Targetly could be a valuable asset to your e-commerce business by providing you the ability to not just handle these complexities on the back end, but also give you the power to better inform your visitors and give them the right info, without having to have them read your shipping information for every city or state in the United States.
Another example of businesses that would benefit from city-specific messaging is moving, plumbing, electrical, or repair businesses. When doing business in multiple cities, you might have different rates or restrictions based on location. For example, if you don’t provide service to a city based on permits required, or distance to travel (despite the cities potentially being adjacent), you’ll want to display that information to visitors from the city where you don’t provide service. Displaying this kind of information to potential customers is essential. If you don’t offer services in their area, the last thing you want to do takes payment or begin scheduling service, only to find out your user was mistaken about your service area. Not only will this kind of service help you save face and provide better customer service, but it will also help to provide you with better quality leads! This kind of service would be especially useful to businesses directly adjacent to tri-state areas.
Step by Step Guide
This may sound like the perfect fit for your business. You’ve been looking to deal with cities better on your website for a long time. But you might be wondering how complicated this kind of service to set up and configure. If your business is like one of the ones we’ve described, you most likely aren’t a resident expert when it comes to IP geolocation databases. That’s not a problem.
We’ll show you how to serve different content to different cities using Geo Targetly in just four easy steps.
Step One: Create a city redirect rule
Step Two: Add multiple city redirect rule
Step Three: Add an optional default redirect rule
Step Four: Add code to website
Yes, it’s that easy. With just a few simple steps you can redirect users based on the city they are visiting your website from.
Communicate your pricing, service information, and add even promote events more clearly to users from various cities. Instead of trying to make your website speak to everyone, think about messaging that works generally, and leave that as your default. Then add rules and location-specific messaging, and take advantage of the easy to use geolocation database to provide superior information to your customers.
Conclusion
Doing business across state lines in the United States means that you might have to consider how visitors from your website from different US states consume your content. And depending on the type of business you run, there is an excellent chance that you already have to deal with customers from multiple states, and already have a process in place on the back-end to handle
The special considerations involved. If your website speaks to all these visitors equally or doesn’t address special considerations for different states, you should think about how you might be missing out when it comes to providing the correct information to your visitors, and by providing them with the services they want and require.
There are a wide variety of reasons that businesses might have for talking to visitors from different states with different messaging. Regulations, rules, and taxes vary by state, and your business should be able to indicate what services you can provide to visitors from other states. You also might be limited based on travel or team size, so letting customers from other states know that you have limited capacities in those areas could be a valuable way for your business to prioritise leads.
If you’re intent on providing the best website experience to your visitors and customers, you should invest in a geo redirection service, like Geo Targetly. Use redirection as a tool to provide your customers with the most accurate information based on their location.
To start redirecting your visitors by state, claim your free trial now!
