With so many ways to communicate in the age of Globalization, more and more SEO experts provide their services to customers overseas.

If, let` s say, you are based in San Francisco and you just found a potential customer with a local business in France, le Champs-Élysées will have to wait. All it takes is a few emails and some phone calls, and the new search engine marketing campaign is ready to start.

Sounds easy? Sure it does, but there`s a catch!

Search engines usually show different results for the same keyword, based on different locations.

For example, the Google results you will see from your San Francisco office will not be similar to those your customer will see from Paris. So, when she receives your first ranking report, it may not make much sense to her:

Luckily, there are two solutions to this problem:

1. Change your location in browser using Google Location
2. Create a customized Google Location search engine in Advanced Web Ranking

Change your location in browser using Google Location

Google personalizes results based on location awareness, establishing this way the relevance of the results it returns to the searchers.

So, when someone with an IP address in Paris searches for “XML editor”, Google will automatically show a list of results in Google.fr, with the location set to Paris.

To see the same rankings from a San Francisco IP address, you need to make some adjustments in your search criteria:

• Perform the search in the specific Google domain

Google’s automatic IP address detection will always send searchers to their respective country and local search by default.

For example, when you go to google.com and run a search from your USA IP address, you are presented with a set of results from Google.com, relevant for your location.

But, when our French friend here goes to google.com, she is automatically redirected to Google.fr.

To see the same results she does, you need to type google.fr in your browser.

• Narrow location to city level

Selecting the relevant Google local domain gets only half the job done. The other half is to narrow the location from country to city level.

A simple search on Google.fr from IP addresses located in different cities will reveal different results returned by the search engine.

To track your customer`s rankings correctly, you need to further narrow the locations down to a city. Just change the location from the left side of the results list in browser, and new results will be automatically displayed.

Easy as pie… if you only have one French customer

But, if you are an establish SEO agency, with tens or hundreds of customers from all over the world, managing Google location manually for each of them may not be very efficient.

Create a customized Google Location search engine in Advanced Web Ranking

Here’s where our SEO software comes to rescue. There are three easy steps you need to take to manage multiple Google locations within Advanced Web Ranking:

• Define the Google location

To define your Google Location in AWR, go to Project – Search engines – Add Search Engines and select the Add Google Location Search Engine option from the drop down list. Here, choose the Google domain, the location and the language you are interested in.

And since everything started in Paris…

• Add the new Google location to your AWR project

Once you`ve chosen the domain, location and language, click on the Next button and select the new AWR search engine created. Then click on Finish to add it to your project.

You can define as many Google location search engines as you need within the same project. This is helpful when you have customers who target different countries and cities in the same search engine marketing campaign.

• Run a new project update

To see rankings for the newly added search engines, you need to run a new update. Just click on the green arrow icon on the left side of the application window, and your work is done. AWR will gather the fresh ranking data for you, while you can sit back and enjoy le Champs-Élysées on a nice travel blog

When the update process is completed, you should see your customers` websites on the same positions as searchers querying Google from Paris do.

And the best part about this is that you only have to do this once as opposed to changing the Google location manually in browser every time you search. Further project updates will retrieve the rankings for all Google location search engines you have already defined in the application.

All there`s left to do now is to send your customers some awesome SEO ranking reports and impress them with your skills.

Conclusion

Approaching customers globally has a great impact on businesses in online markets. Your office address should no longer be a criterion for customers choosing you as their SEO service provider.

Yet, to give them reports with accurate search engines results they can rely on, you need to emulate their clients browsing behavior and address their specific locations.

This is exactly what you can accomplish by using Google Location – the easiest way to look through your customers` eyes and share their searching experiences.

I`m sure each of you have your own techniques to manage locations, maybe also using other Google services like Places or Maps. So scroll down the page just a little bit and share your thoughts in the comments section below.