The owner of a small ski and snowboard rental and tune shop in a mountain town looked at last winter’s campaign report and couldn’t make it add up.
The ads had been seen plenty of times. People had clicked. But the reservations for rental packages, the thing the shop most wanted to sell before the season, had barely moved. Meanwhile the tune bench was so busy in December that locals were waiting a week for a wax and edge job, and the shop hadn’t spent anything to promote it.
When she and her nephew sat down with the settings, the problem was simple to describe. The campaign had targeted a circle around the shop. The people inside that circle were mostly locals who already owned their gear and didn’t need rentals. The people who needed rentals were planning their trips from cities three and four hours away, and the campaign wasn’t reaching them at all. The few who did click landed on the shop’s home page, which opened with a photo of the tune bench and said nothing about reserving rentals in advance.
The right town. The wrong people. The wrong page.
This article is a set of geo tips for a business like hers: tips that sound advanced, but come down to a few clear decisions about who you’re trying to reach, where they are when they search, and what they should find when they arrive. The shop is invented. The mismatch is one of the most common in local and regional marketing.
In this article, GEO means geographic targeting: choosing where your marketing appears based on location. It applies to paid campaigns, which let you choose places to show ads, and to local search, where the content of your pages and listings helps match you to people searching for what you offer in your area.
The goal is relevance, not volume. A campaign that reaches fewer people who actually need what you sell will almost always be worth more than one that reaches many people who don’t. Geo targeting is how you choose those people on purpose.
Two different kinds of visibility are easy to confuse.
The first is local search: the map results and nearby listings people see when they search for something close by, such as “ski tune near me” or “ski rental” while standing in town. These results depend heavily on accurate listings, a clear category, and pages that describe what you do and where. You don’t buy your way into them. You earn relevance with accurate information.
The second is a regional campaign: paid ads that you aim at a place, often far from your shop. A ski shop’s rental campaign might target cities several hours away where people plan weekend trips. Those people aren’t searching for something nearby. They’re searching for something at the place they’re going.
The tune bench in this story lives mostly on local search. The rental reservations depend on a regional campaign. Treating them as one job is how the shop ended up with the wrong results.
This is the most useful geo setting most small businesses never touch.
Advertising platforms generally let you choose between two kinds of location targeting. Microsoft Advertising’s help article on location targeting describes them plainly: you can show ads to people who are in the locations you choose, or to people who are in, searching for, or viewing pages about those locations. Other platforms offer similar choices with their own names.
For a trade business, the first option is usually right. A plumber wants people who are actually in the service area, because a person three states away reading about the town can’t hire them.
For tourism, the second option is often the point. A skier in the city who searches for “ski rentals” plus the name of the mountain town is exactly who the shop wants, even though she’s hundreds of miles away. Choosing only people physically in the town would miss her entirely.
The choice isn’t technical. It’s a statement about who your customer is and where they are when they decide.
Location targeting usually offers several kinds of boundaries. The same Microsoft help article lists country, state or province, county, city, metro area, postal code, and radius around a point. Each draws a different shape, and the shape should match how your customers actually move.
A radius is simple and familiar, but it ignores mountains, rivers, and roads. A circle around a mountain town may include the other side of a ridge that takes two hours to drive around.
A city boundary matches how people talk, but city limits rarely match where customers live.
Postal codes let you be precise, and they’re useful when you know exactly which neighborhoods your customers come from. The help article also notes that where a postal code isn’t supported for targeting, it may be converted to a radius, so it’s worth checking what the platform actually applied.
A metro area can be the right unit for a tourism business whose customers come from cities. The U.S. Census Bureau describes metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas as a core area with a substantial population, plus adjacent communities that have a high degree of economic and social integration with that core. In other words, a metro area groups the city with the suburbs and towns whose residents live, work, and shop as part of it. For a ski shop, targeting the metro areas where its visitors live will usually reach more of the right people than targeting a handful of city names.
There are other boundaries that don’t show up as a setting at all: drive time, season, and cause. A tourism business might think in terms of “within a four-hour drive,” then approximate it with a set of metro areas and counties. A nonprofit might think in terms of the counties where it delivers services, or the communities connected to its cause.
Exclusions are the other half of a boundary.
The ski shop’s rental campaign doesn’t need to reach people who live in town. They already own gear, and the few who don’t will find the shop on the map. Excluding the town itself from the rental campaign, while keeping the local listing and tune pages strong, puts the rental budget where the rental customers are.
Exclusions work for other businesses too. A trade business might exclude a neighboring county it doesn’t serve, even though it’s inside a convenient radius. A nonprofit might exclude areas covered by a partner organization so the two don’t compete for the same volunteers.
Be careful with exclusions, though. It’s easy to exclude too much and stop reaching people you need. Write down each exclusion and the reason for it, so someone can review it at the start of next season.
Location targeting is useful, but it isn’t perfect. The Microsoft help article is candid about this: location targeting and exclusions may not always work as expected, for reasons such as a person’s device settings and the limits of geolocation technology.
In practice, that means a few things. Some people outside your boundary will see your ads, and some inside it won’t. A person traveling for work may look like a local for a few days. A person on a mobile network may appear to be somewhere nearby rather than exactly where they are.
None of this is a reason to give up on geo targeting. It’s a reason to measure by what happens on your site and at your counter, not only by where the platform says people were. If the reservation form asks for the arrival date and where the guest is traveling from, you’ll learn more about your real geography in one season than any setting can tell you.
Free tools can show you where interest in a topic is coming from. Google Trends, for example, can show interest in a search term by region and over time. That’s useful for choosing where to focus a regional campaign. It’s also easy to misread.
The Google Trends FAQ explains that its data is a sample of searches, and that results are normalized to the time and place of the query and then scaled from 0 to 100. That means a value reflects how much of the searching in a region was about your topic, compared with other places and times, not the raw number of searches. A small region where a large share of searches are about skiing can show higher relative interest than a large city where far more people search, but where those searches are a smaller share of the total.
The same FAQ notes that searches with very low volume appear as 0, that a small amount of statistical noise is added, and that Trends data isn’t a scientific poll. It’s one data point among others.
For the ski shop, that means Trends can suggest which cities are paying attention to skiing as the season approaches, but it shouldn’t be the only reason to target or ignore a city. Combine it with what you know: where last season’s reservations came from, which highways lead to town, and which cities have direct routes.
Geo targeting decides who sees your ad. The page they land on decides whether the ad was worth it.
The ski shop had one home page trying to serve two very different people. The local with a dull edge wanted to know about the tune bench’s turnaround and hours. The visitor planning a trip wanted to reserve rental packages before arriving. Neither found what they needed quickly.
The fix was two clear pages.
The rental page answers the questions a planner has, three hours away: where the shop is in relation to the lifts and lodging, what’s included in a rental package, how to reserve in advance, how sizing works, what to bring, when to pick up, and what happens if the trip changes. Its title and opening say the town’s name and “ski and snowboard rentals” in plain words.
The tune page answers the local’s questions: what services are offered, how long they take in season, how to drop off, and the hours. It also says the town name, because locals search for it too.
The regional campaign sends people to the rental page. The local listing points to the tune page. Each query lands on a page that answers it.
People don’t always search for a place by its official name. A visitor may search for the mountain, not the town. A local may use the name of the valley, the lake, or the old name of a neighborhood. Someone driving in may search for the exit or the pass they just came through.
The ski shop learned this from its own reservation notes. Visitors from the city almost always wrote the name of the ski area, not the name of the town where the shop sits, a few miles down the road. Locals used the town’s name and, often, the name of the main street. Both were right, and neither group used the other’s words.
The lesson for geo targeting and for pages is the same. Use the names your customers use, in plain sentences, where they make sense. The rental page says the shop is in the town, on the main road to the ski area, a short drive from the base lodge. The tune page uses the town name and the street. Neither page repeats place names in a list or stuffs them into every heading. They simply describe where the shop is in the words a person would use to give directions.
This matters for trades and nonprofits too. A plumber who serves “the north shore” should say which towns that means. A food pantry that serves “the valley” should name the communities, because a family searching for help will use the name of their own town.
Before putting money behind a geo-targeted campaign, read the landing page as the person you’re targeting would. A good test is to ask whether it answers these questions in the first screen or two.
1. Is this the right place? The town or area should be named plainly, along with where you are in relation to things a visitor knows, such as the lifts, the main road, or the downtown.
2. Is this the right thing? The page should say exactly what you offer for this person, in their words, not yours.
3. Is this the right time? If the service is seasonal, the page should say when it starts, when to book, and how hours change.
4. What do I do next? The next step, whether it’s reserving, calling, or dropping off, should be obvious and should work on a phone.
5. What should I know before I come? Parking, pickup times, what to bring, and anything that commonly surprises people.
If the page can’t answer those questions, more targeting won’t help. The match between the query and the page is where trust starts.
Geography and season work together. For a ski shop, the planning window for a trip opens well before the snow arrives in town. People in the city book lodging, then look for rentals. Locals don’t think about tunes until the first cold week.
That suggests a simple sequence. Start the regional rental campaign while visitors are planning, aimed at the metro areas where they live. Keep the local tune page and listing current all year, and update the listing’s hours and the tune page’s turnaround time as the season starts. As the season ends, change the rental page to say when reservations open for next winter, rather than leaving it to promise packages that are no longer available.
The same thinking applies to any seasonal business. Ask when your customers decide, and where they are when they do. That tells you when to start and where to aim.
The ski shop’s two audiences illustrate a broader pattern.
Trade customers usually search with a problem and a location: “furnace repair” plus a town, or “near me.” They want someone who can arrive soon and who clearly serves their area. For a trade, geo targeting is about presence: being clearly available to people inside the service area, with a page that names the towns served and the hours.
Tourism customers search for a place first, then for things to do there. They’re often far away, planning ahead, and comparing. For tourism, geo targeting is about reaching people where they live, with content about where they’re going.
Nonprofit audiences search in several ways at once. People who need services search close to home and need clear locations, hours, and eligibility. Volunteers search near where they live or work. Donors may live anywhere but care about a particular place. A nonprofit may need different boundaries for each group, and different pages that answer each group’s questions.
The ski shop has a little of each: locals behave like trade customers, and visitors behave like tourists. Seeing that difference is the most useful geo insight of all.
Before you set up or adjust geo targeting, gather a few things:
With that in hand, the targeting settings become a translation of decisions you’ve already made.
This winter, the shop’s rental campaign reaches people in the metro areas where its visitors live, including people searching for rentals in the town by name. The town itself is excluded from the rental ads. The rental page names the town, the distance to the lifts, the packages, and the pickup times, and its reservation form asks where guests are traveling from. The tune page and listing tell locals the turnaround and hours.
When a family from the city reserves four rental packages in November, they land on a page that answers every question they have. When a local with a gouged base searches for a tune in town, the listing sends him to the right page and the right hours. The ads reach fewer people than last year. More of them are the right people.
If your business serves people who live nearby and people who travel to reach you, start by writing down who each group is, where they are when they decide, and what they need to see. Bring that list, along with last season’s customer locations, to a conversation with WeKinnect. We’ll help you choose the boundaries, build the pages, and make every query land where it should.
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
Written By
Maren Hale focuses on brand positioning at WeKinnect Global Branding Agency. Guided by the core value of Service before Self, she writes for entrepreneurs and family-owned legacy businesses. Maren writes on Business Listings, Google Business Profile, SEO, GEO (being found by AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok), and Community. WeKinnect serves businesses across restaurants, arts, travel and tourism, banking, home services, nonprofits, and the pet industry. Maren brings that same spirit of service to every piece she writes.
Most people meet a small business twice before they ever walk in. The first time is a few words on a map: a name, a pin, a line of h
Picture a woman standing in her kitchen in early December, holding a dress she bought for a holiday party. It's two inches too long.
A new year plan fails most often because it lives in five places. A note on a phone. A spreadsheet on a laptop. A paper calendar by
A new year is a tempting moment to add AI tools. It is a better moment to sort the ones you already touched. What should you start o