Should I Block Entire Countries From Accessing My Website For More Qualified Traffic?

Blocking entire countries from accessing your website is a potent method to acquire more targeted, relevant, and qualified traffic to your website. Not to mention, your website traffic analytics will be squeaky clean, your web hosting service resources will receive a significant boost in performance, and you can (in most cases) close the door on spam.

Let’s look at the big picture and create an example. You have a website that offers services explicitly to the United States. In this case, let’s back this scenario up a bit further and say that you operate an e-commerce website that is only permitted to ship to the United States — alone, this is grounds for you to provide strict access to your visitors within your serviceable area.

Now, let’s dive into why this is effective.

• Generally speaking, when your niche website is broadcasting to the entire internet population, the vast majority of your website traffic is complete garbage. By eliminating whole countries from accessing your website, you will effectively speak to your specific target audience only.
• You will immediately obtain enhanced website performance and website security. Bottom line, you are limiting traffic to more relevant users; this is a sure-fire method to streamline your site performance by reducing the load and keeping the creepy-crawlers at bay.
• Enhanced Search Engine Optimization (SEO). (In my experience, Google secretly loves country restriction) This perk is debatable; by serving my websites to my target users only, I have only seen positive benefits in organic Google rankings. Think website relevancy. It’s always a factor in determining your Google rank.

Wrapping up.

Restricting access to your website is a wise move; however, tread lightly as you do not want to miss out on the vast array of opportunities found worldwide.

Be strategic in your approach and only implement country restrictions if you genuinely have a valid reason to do so, whether it be due to spam, your operations and distribution, or security.

If you need help defining your website user-base and targeting specific countries, I would be happy to help.

Mike Danna — Lead Developer, Vessio.com