Did you know that Google displays different search results depending on your location? Many people overlook this (even SEO consultants) but local search helps tremendously if you’re targeting mainly Singapore for example. Here are some SEO tips to help you appear on Google.com.sg.

First, you’ll probably want to know the benefits of optimizing for local searches right? If you’re in Singapore and you type ‘www.google.com’ into your browser, you’ll be automatically redirected to ‘www.google.com.sg’ - Google does this based on your IP address. FYI, different countries have different blocks of IP addresses, e.g. mine’s 66.249.73.37.

Based on my experience, Google gives more weightage to country-specific webpages in local search results, in an effort to make them more ‘relevant’. So if Google decides that your website provides good local information for a particular search/keyword, you automatically get a ‘boost’ on google.com.sg!

Put them both together, you get Singaporean users who will unknowingly be using www.google.com.sg and who will see your website at the top of their search results because you’ve optimized it with local content.

Let’s look at an example. Depending on where you are and your selection, this is how I rank if you searched for ’seo consultant’:

1. Google.com (in Singapore) - #7 of 795,000 results
2. Google.com (in U.S.) - #17 of 723,000 results
3. Google.com.sg - ranked #3 of 800,000 results
4. Google.com.sg (pages from Singapore) - n/a

From (1) and (2), you can see that someone in Singapore and somone in the U.S. will see different search results although they’re both using the same search engine, i.e. www.google.com. Previously, this was because we were getting results from different Google datacenters (servers) and this discrepancy will disappear once all the datacenters are updated. This doesn’t seem to be the case anymore as the search results for ’seo consultant’ have been like this for over a week. I get the feeling that my ‘local’ content plays a part in Google’s algorithm these days.

My website doesn’t appear in (4) simply because it’s not hosted in Singapore and neither am I’m using a ccTLD (com.sg or .sg) - the two requirements for appearing in ONLY ‘pages from Singapore’.

The results that we’re most insterested in is (3). Not suprisingly, I have the highest ranking there although the total number of results is about the same as (1) and (2).

So how do you ‘inform’ Google that you’re a Singapore website?

Apart from having the word ‘Singapore’ in the meta information (i.e. title, description and keyword) of your mainpage and writing local content, try doing this:

1. have the word ‘Singapore’ on all your pages - a sitewide footer should do.

2. put your full address and telephone number (including +65) on your site.

3. ensure links to you have ‘Singapore’ in the anchortext, e.g. Singapore SEO Consultant.

4. get linked from obvious Singapore sites, e.g. Yellow Pages, local blogs, etc.

5. link to authority Singapore sites, e.g. AsiaOne, ACRA, etc.

6. add yourself to Google Local Business Center and get listed on Google Maps.

After doing all the above and if you’ve done the usual SEO work, you should rank higher on Google (Singapore) thanks to the advantages of ‘localized’ content.