This one’s for Romania

Just noticed some new features in Google Search Console. You can look at data from individual countries. It’s quite revealing. Actually, ‘disturbing’ is a better word.

Over the last two months Bicclescombe Grange has had about 25000 impressions, i.e. it has appeared in that many organic search results. Out of which we have gathered 263 clicks, visits to the website. I imagined the bulk of those figures would be from the UK, but it turns out that although we did account for 243 of the 263 clicks, we were only in second place on the impressions table and with just 3854 of the 25000 total. First on the list and with a reassuringly huge 4603 impressions was… Romania! With zero clicks. Third was India, with 3520 impressions and also zero clicks, then came the US with 1 solitary click out of 1364 impressions, then came the big Devon fan bases of Brazil, Russia and Malaysia…

So, I might need to re-evaluate. I’m guessing these other countries are not generally looking for a lovely Devon house with a fantastic indoor pool. They’re probably just bots, slurping up data, or people paid not very much to behave like bots. They will rummage a lot further through the pages than a normal searcher would, resulting in our site making more appearances (and for a while making me think I haven’t been wasting all my time!), but obviously they are not interested in clicking and certainly aren’t going to be coming to stay.

I think I will need to filter out international results at some point. Rather depressingly though, if I were to do that now, a lot of the search query figures are somewhat sparse and might well mean little. So, currently at least, I must welcome our Romanian viewers and hope that their involvement can still make for worthwhile data.