The Internet may be largely an international place, but the same Internet isn't exactly accessed in Singapore as it is in San Francisco. From the perspective of an Internet marketer (or any other kind of online entrepreneur or business owner), this is a very important thing to keep in mind. How a website looks to you in Vancouver might not be the same as how it's seen in Vienna.

So, what can you do? If you want to target an international audience, you want to see what they're seeing and one way to do this is to install the GeoSurf Toolbar in your web browser. It puts the world at your fingertips.

Getting a Global Perspective

So, what is GeoSurf? In a nutshell, it's a toolbar that you can install in either Firefox or Internet Explorer that allows you to access any site on the Internet as if you were viewing it from another location altogether.


This can prove to be incredibly useful for a number of different purposes. Let's say that you are geotargeting a few select countries as part of an ad campaign and your current home location isn't one of those countries. By using GeoSurf, you can visit the sites serving your campaign to ensure that it is display correctly.

You can also check up on things like whether your ads are leading to the correct landing pages. It doesn't make sense for an English ad to send a user to a Japanese landing page or vice versa, right? GeoSurf has a premium proxy network with servers in 70 locations around the globe.

Setup and Usage

The installation and setup process is quite simple. You download the toolbar file, run the setup process, and it'll automatically dock itself in Firefox or Internet Explorer. From there, you click on the "login" button at the top right, enter your credentials, and away you go.

As you can see in the screenshot above, all you have to do is pick the global location you'd like to use, click on apply, and you're done. You can then surf the web as if you were from that location. For example, Pandora Radio is not available in Canada (where I am); by using the Los Angeles proxy, I can access the site without a hitch.

Want to check more than one country at a time? You can do that too. Click on the "Geoview" button in the toolbar and you can view any website from up to eight geo-locations simultaneously. That's very powerful for checking landing pages, for instance, without having to hop between the individual countries.

It should be noted that using GeoSurf in Internet Explorer will affect any concurrent browsers running on your computer. When I had it running in IE, my Chrome window would keep asking for my GeoSurf credentials. In this way, it is best to only run the single browser when using GeoSurf.

How Much Does It Cost?

There are four pricing plans available with GeoSurf.


The cheapest is the Group plan at $29 per month. This provides for access to only one of the proxy servers, however, and only allows for up to 100MB of monthly bandwidth. From there, you can step up to the $59/month Pro plan, the $89/month Plus plan, or the unlimited plan. It really depends on the specific needs of your company which plan you should select.

The good news is, regardless of your choice, you get a five day free trial to take the GeoSurf toolbar out for a test drive. Go ahead and travel the world, so to speak, without ever leaving your desk.