The situation
The client advises fintechs and enterprise technology firms entering the GCC. Its audience sits in the UAE, India, Singapore and Africa, but the site is one English-language site with no separate market pages. In July 2026 it was also hit by a Japanese-keyword spam hack.
What Search Console showed
Over the 90 days to 16 August 2026:
| Market | Clicks | Click-through rate | Average position |
|---|---|---|---|
| UAE | 35 | 27.13% | 5.0 |
| India | 31 | 17.13% | 8.8 |
| Singapore | 2 | 14.29% | 4.9 |
| United States | 4 (791 impressions) | 0.51% | 5.8 |
| Japan | 8 | 6.50% | 6.9 |
The positives are clear. The UAE converts impressions into clicks at more than one in four. India and Singapore already click at healthy rates on small volumes. The problem markets, the US and Japan, were showing hacked spam pages rather than real content.
What we did
- Separated real demand from spam. We labelled 26 hack URLs in Search Console and prioritised removal. Over 400 spam URLs have been removed so far, and spam impressions are fading (8 in the latest week of the October report).
- Recommended a WordPress security plugin and a clean sitemap resubmission so Google could re-trust the real pages.
- Chose the UAE as the lead market and planned every service page for it first.
- Treated India and Singapore as corridor markets. These are firms entering the GCC, not local service markets, so they get corridor pages rather than separate city pages.
- Fixed the basics that block every market: four of nine articles were not indexed, placeholder pages were public, and the author on every article was a generic account.
Results so far
By the October report (4 June to 5 October), the site had 115 clicks and 4,314 impressions from legitimate pages, led by the UAE. About half the clicks are brand searches, which shows strong name recognition but also the next job: ranking for the phrases a buyer would type.
What is next
A 90-day plan: clean-up and indexing in month one, three service pages in month two, then a fintech licensing hub and a GCC market-entry page in month three. Corridor pages and case studies follow.
Lessons
- Segment Search Console by country before choosing markets.
- A hack can distort country data. Clean it before drawing conclusions.
- Do not create city pages you cannot support with proof.
A second angle: export markets
For a Dubai IT distributor, we also built a markets page covering the GCC, CIS, Europe and Africa, with Jebel Ali logistics and transit support. It was still "discovered, not crawled" on 20 October 2026. The next step is internal links from the homepage and the sourcing guides.