I was just going over my Google Analytics stats and I noticed several visits sent by organic Google search results for “web host” and “web hosting”, obviously keywords I would like my site associated with.  So, I did a search in Google myself to see if my position on the SERP had moved up, but I didn’t notice any change.

Looking more closely at Analytics, I saw these visits originated from Singapore. I did another Google search, setting the gl parameter to sg.  (BTW, you can check search engine results for any geographic location by setting this parameter, eg. &gl=us, &gl=ca, and so on. Just use the two-letter abbreviation for the country).  Anyway, there I was on the first page on Google in Singapore for “web hosting”.

Now, that led to a few interesting questions. First, why Singapore? Second, why would I have a better SERP position for Singapore than web hosts that rank higher on US SERPS?

First, my server is located in the USA so that rules out the geographic location of my website.

Second, I thought that perhaps I might have a disproportionately high number of inbound links originating from Singapore… nope.  I logged into my Google Webmaster Tools account to get a list of inbound links, did an nslookup on the domains, and then did an IP2country lookup. The vast majority link from servers also based in the USA.  In fact, I didn’t have a single link originating from Singapore.

Third, I looked at my geographic location setting in my Webmaster Tools account… it wasn’t set.

Scratching my head, I went back to my Analytics account and viewed the full report for the Map Overlay. What I noticed about visitors from Singapore was extremely interesting.  Over the last couple of months, visitors from Singapore just happened to have viewed more pages, had lower bounce rates, and spent significantly more time on my site than those from other countries (twice as long in fact). The average was highly skewed by just one visitor who spent an unusually long time on the site, but looking at those stats it would appear to an algorithm that my site was particularly relevant in Singapore based on what visitors from Singapore did on my site.

It appears as though I’ve stumbled upon another piece of the puzzle that is the Google Algorithm. What people actually do seems to trump page rank, number of inbound links, and every other area those engaged in SEO concern themselves with.  In Singapore, I beat out other sites with higher page rank and more inbound links for extraordinarily competitive keywords.

Now, this is far from conclusive and my observation is not statistically significant but it does appear as though something is going on. It would be interesting for other webmasters to check their analytics accounts to see if there is a specific country from which visitors seem to perform more favorable actions on their sites, and then see how that correlates with SERP positions targeted to those countries.

Comments please…