Why the location of my queries is wrong?

[Midleton]

Hi there,

I've got a question related to the location of the queries shown in GWT.

My company operates just in Spain but according to GWT the majority of my queries comes from Sweden. Let's say 75% Sweden, 20% Spain, 5% rest of the countries.

Of course I've set as Internatinal Targeting Spain as country,

How could this be possible considering that spanish it is not the main language in Sweden. Can this be changed?

Thank u

[DirkC]

Hi,

A bit strange. I assume that you are using a generic TLD (.com, .net, .org or something similar) and the the language used on the site is Spanish. With the limited information you give is not easy to find out what is causing this problem.

You could set the hreflang tag to "es" to make it very obvious for Google that you are targeting the Spanish market.

How is your link profile - is the majority of the links coming from Spain (or Spanish speaking countries) or do you have a lot of links coming from Sweden?

Are the "Swedish" queries you find in GWT also Spanish, and are they similar to the queries from other countries? Do you see Sweden as an important source of traffic in Analytics?

rgds,

Dirk

[gfiorelli1]

Well, indeed a strange case this one of yours.

If your site is in Spanish, is geo-targeted toward Spain in Google Webmaster Tools, then traffic should mostly from Spain. Or if any other country is popping up, that should something like Mexico or Argentina.

Sincerely this sounds like a mystery to me... so much that I asked clues to John Mueller on G+. Let's see if he will answer

[Midleton]

Hi Gianluca,

Thanks a lot for your contribution.

Yes it sounds a mistery to me as well. If you get further clues on the topic please let me know

Cheers

[gfiorelli1]

Hi... I don't know if you have discovered the reason of the mysterious traffic from Sweden.

I've thought about it, and the only justifications I can think about are these:

1. or your company name corresponds also to a real Swedish brand, so Swedish people are entering in your site for brand name searches;

2. or that your domain name - if it a generic one - once was the domain name of a Swedish website, hence with still enough link popularity from Swedish website, so that i can still rank in google.se