International foreign language SEO questions
-
I'm looking to add some foreign language pages to a website and have a lot of international SEO questions. I think the overall question is can you do SEO yourself if you are a native English speaker for a language you don't speak (like Chinese)?
1. How do you go about doing keyword research for a foreign language? What tools are available?
2. How do you know what search engines you should optimize for in a different country? And where can you find the technical SEO requirements for each? I'm wondering things like title tag length for Baidu. Or is the Title length different for Yahoo Japan vs. US? Do you write titles and meta tags in Chinese/Japanese for respective countries? Etc.
-
Hi!
First of all I strongly suggest you to check this wonderful deck on Slideshare by Fernando Maciá. That deck will answer many questions your asking.
Then:
- Can you do SEO yourself if you are a native English speaker for a language you don't speak (like Chinese)?
No! You cannot. Consider to hire a native interpreter to help you, if not a good native SEO
2) How do you go about doing keyword research for a foreign language? What tools are available?
As Lynn said, Adwords Keyword Planner and (Google Trends) are a good start. But I would use these tools by Baidu, which is the most used search engine in China:
- Baidu Keyword Tool ;
- Baidu Index (equivalent to Google Trends)
The best is using all three... and for that you need a native Chinese speaking person.
In this article you can find useful tips and links about keyword search in Chinese.
3) How do you know what search engines you should optimize for in a different country?
Use StatCounter.com for understanding what search engines are used in a specific country. The short answer is:
- Google is worldwide used and substantially dominant in every country
- Baidu in China is dominant
- Yandex in Russia is dominant
- Seznam is not dominant in the Czech Republic as it was once, but it still owns about the 20% of the search market share
- Naver (47%) and Google (44%) dominate in South Korea
- In Japan the 35% of the Internet users search on Yahoo!
About SEo for Baidu you can check this guide, which is not perfect but could be considered a good start (aka: do your homework too!).
About SEO for Yandex, I suggest you to dig into this site by Anna Oshkalo. And don't forget to read everything of the Webmasters' Guidelines of Yandex itself.
As far as SEO for Japan, this essential guide can be a considered a good primer.
About Naver, check this great starter post on WebCertain.
-
HI,
Generally I find it is very difficult to do SEO for foreign languages if you do not have a native/bilingual speaker on your team. Sure you can get a professional translation done which may be proper in its language use, but if the terms you are targetting are even somewhat competitive then your chances of ranking are slim. To compete you would need all the normal signals associated with good rankings (inbound iinks, social signals etc) in your chosen language and this is really pretty much impossible without a native speaker and someone who is familiar with the language, country, customs etc in question (I wont even get into the issue of getting incoming leads in foreign languages that you cannot support or getting a user to the site in one language and then insisting on communicating in a different language... not ideal!).
For keyword research the google keyword planner is probably still your first point of call for any language, but if you do not speak the language... what kind of insight are you going to get??
Just my two cents, but for me if you don't speak the language and seriously want to target a foreign language... find a native speaker to help!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
International Homepage Advice
Hello, colleagues! We have a conundrum. A client website has a good subdirectory strategy for localized/translated content for its various international markets, but nothing currently "lives" at the root. In my mind, this presents a challenge to search engines (note that we have had some trouble getting proper visibility overall, which is why I'm asking this question). I'm looking for any links or just plain old good advice on why it's important to have a global homepage. Should that global homepage be in English? Most enterprise sites I've worked with do have a homepage that's in English, with the ability to select a country from a drop down in a nav across the site. Any advice, best practices, etc. about why a global homepage is important and what language it could/should be in would be really helpful. Hreflang tags would make sense, I guess, but each country has slightly different offerings so I'm not sure that it makes complete sense. In other words, one country's homepage may have completely different content than another's. Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | SimpleSearch0 -
Hotel SEO, 3-pack & Search Console: How to get the right data and how to improve CTR?
Hey guys, I've been working with some hotels and I feel like there are some specific issues which need special solutions.
Algorithm Updates | | Maggiathor
Maybe some of you also work for hotels and face similar problems. Question 1: Google "forces" 3-packs impressions to OTAs like booking.com via Hotel Ads. You basically have a big blue "book now" button and a small little website button. This ends up basically leading to CTRs below 1% despite a 1-3 Position. Is there any way to improve the organic CTR? Of course we use hotel ads, but they offer bad analytics AND we basically pay for our SEO-Performance. Question 2: Search console doesn't specify wether or not a impression comes from 3-Pack or the rest of the organic results, which basically leads to a average position which says nothing. It's hard to evaluate the performance of meta-titles and texts, because the ctr is also mixed. What would be a better way to get this data or do you think google will change this in some time (new search console doesn't offer this). Question 3: Hotel Rankings are dominated by OTAs, Meta-Searchers and BIg Chains. Has anyone experience in SEO for smaller, family owned Hotels? Any tricks how to get a steady traffic source outside of brand results? Hope there are some travel experts in here 🙂0 -
Question About : Redirecting Old Pages to New & More Relevant Ones
I'm looking over a friends website, which used to have great natural ranking for some big keywords. Those ranking & CTR's have dropped a lot, so the next thing I checked into was top selling Brand & Category pages. Its seems like every year or so a New Page was constructed for each brand... Many of which have high quality and natural inbound links. However, the pages no longer have products and simply look outdated. I'm trying to figure out if they should place redirects on all the old pages to a new URL which is more seo friendly. Example Links : http://www.xyz.com/nike2004.html , http://www.xyz.com/nike-spring2006.html , http://www.xyz.com/2011-nike-shoes.html - (have quality inbound links, bad content) .... Basically would it be advantageous to place redirects on all of these example pages to a new one that will be more permanent... http://www.xyz.com/nike-shoes.html I'm also looking at about 15 brands and maybe 100+ old/outdated urls, so I wasn't sure if I should do this & to what extent. Considering many of the brand pages do rank, but not as well as they should... Any input would help, thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
Wordpress Seo Title and Tagline
Hello, I am using wordpress. I also have a plugin called All in One SEO. I was wondering, how I should set up my SiteTitle and Tagline? The main keyword I am going after is "Baking " Others are Cooking, Teaching, World food
Algorithm Updates | | Cinfo10 -
Climate of fear in the world of SEO
There certainly appears to be a certain climate of fear about backlinks at the mo, and not without reason. I was wondering why Google moved from simply discounting links to punishing site owners for their backlink profiles, many of which were built up when the risks of punishment weren't there? I mean, I could send them the names of at least 1,000 sites in linkfarms / blog rings - you name it. I'm sure most of us on here could do the same. Responding to the whims of Google is such a waste of time and resources. Why doesn't Google simply choose a direction and stick with it? What is their strategy exactly?
Algorithm Updates | | McTaggart0 -
Is it hurting my seo ranking if robots.txt is forbidden?
robots.txt is forbidden - I have read up on what the robots.txt file does and how to configure it but what about if it is not able to be accessed at all?
Algorithm Updates | | Assembla0 -
SEO Ranking & Brand Names
I have several situations where one of my sites rank organically in 4th or 5th place for a specific search term relating to a 'big brand' .. I usually fall in behind the brands main website .. commercially this is very good for me. Let me give you an example .. in google.co.uk type in 'thomas cook exchange rates'. I rank position 4 (comparecurrency.co.uk). Position 1-3 are thomas cook's own pages. Naturally. However, my question is .. could I outrank them and how could I initially measure the effort involved in getting to position 1? I noticed Google recently put me into position 1 for this term and then quickly (within a few days) pulled me back down to position 4. Does anyone have any experience of this type of search positioning and have any information that may help me? My gut feel is that I have maybe maxed out the economically viable potential of these keywords and that I should invest my SEO $s into other phrases? Thanks in advance Olly
Algorithm Updates | | ojkingston0 -
Yet another Panda question
Hi Guys, I'm just looking for confirmation on something..... In the wake of Panda 2.2 one of my pages has plummeted in the rankings whilst other similar pages have seen healthy improvements. Am I correct in thinking that Panda effects individual pages and doesn't tar an entire site with the same brush? Really I'm trying to see if Panda is the reason in the drop on one page or whether it could be something else. The page in question has dropped 130 positions - not just a general fluctuation. Thanks in advance for your responses!!!
Algorithm Updates | | A_Q0