Translated the site but traffic is not coming
-
Hi,
We've build a lawyer directory website (www.iranianlawyers.com) which already has good Google rankings for related terms (Ex. Iranian lawyers, Iranian lawyers california, etc). About 1.5 months ago we translated the site to Farsi and published it online: www.iranianlawyers.com/farsi
However we have yet to see any new traffic generated from those pages. The website has a decent back-link profile and there are no almost no competitors in our space with translated pages. Would someone please take a look at our translated pages and let me know if there are any major on-site issues that you see that we need to address? I've checked for noindex or nofollow tags but they dont seem to be an issue. Not sure if I'm missing something here.
Thank you very much
-
Thank you all very much. Yes, Farsi is Persian.
CleverPhD, I'm definitely going to add the markups you suggested.
Gianluca, I'm not targeting Iran with the Farsi translations - that is definitely a second goal. I'm targeting Iranians around the world who search on Google in Farsi. Or simply Iranians who land on the site because our offline marketing but they prefer a Farsi website because their English is not very good.
The language markup and the hreflang markup seem basic and easy enough to implement. I also found a bunch of wrong URLs in our sitemap that might have caused some duplicate content issues. I've ran the on-page SEO tool here on Moz too. Moz bot doesn't seem to be able read Farsi but it doens't give me any accessibility issues.
Again, thank you for your replies.
-
Thanks for the comments Gianluca, I am not as up on international stuff and so appreciate the input.
-
Check out my answer to Nima, because in the beginning I also refute one thing you say about translations and duplicate content.
-
Farsi is Persian
Then, and this is for CleverPHD, the hreflang, albeit suggested, is not strictly needed because Google is quite good in understanding that they are two different languages. Moreover: Google stated tons of times that translated content is not duplicate content.
I agree on geotargeting, if you mean to target a specific geo-located audience.
You can do that also for subfolder creating a Google Search Console property for the /farsi subfolder and geo-targeting it in the "Internationalization" section. However, I don't think you are desiring to geo-target to USA, because your lawyers are from all the globe. Am I right thinking, then, that your main country target for the farsi version could be Iran itself, so to offer iranian lawyers abroad for Iranian countries, which want to open its business also thanks to the quite recent end of the blockage?
Finally, I tend to agree with Dimitri...
if the target are the farsi speaking people resident in the USA, probably there is not that much search volume in farsi for your niche, even though and accordingly to the 2,011 census about 400,000 people speak it.
On the other hand, if you're targeting Iran, I would also consider the possibility that the Iranian Internet Laws are somehow limiting the visibility of your /farsi subfolder in Google.
Finally, I didn't check out the technical SEO and On Page SEO state of your site, but I would also check them in order to see or discard any other potential issue.
-
If I am reading your pages correctly, /farsi is the exact same page as your home page, just translated into Farsi.
Here are some things to think about.
-
you have no explicit declaration of what language is on this page in your markup. Google can probably figure it out, but you should mark it explicitly. When I brought up your page in Chrome, Chrome listed that the page was in Persian. It may be that persian is the same as farsi (I dont know) but, little details around being very explicit with the language designation can help.
-
If the /farsi section of your website is an exact translation of the English version of the website, you need to use the hreflang to explain this to Google. Google may not be 100% sure of the relationships of the two sets of pages. They are "duplicates" with the difference being in the type of language and so you want to make sure that Google understands the type of duplication so it knows what to do with it.
-
Are you hoping that persons in the US will be searching in farsi on Google to find your site? Are you hoping that someone in Iran will search for key terms in farsi and Google will show your farsi pages? You need to add some markup to also show what countries you are targeting with each section, depending on your keyword goals. Just to add to what Dimitri posted, I would say a technical SEO audit with someone who understand international markup.
-
-
Hi there.
Well, your website is indexed - site:www.iranianlawyers.com/farsi bunch of pages come up. However, there is no way to tell that no traffic correlates to translation. It's a lot of branding, rankings, demand and so on. I would say that you need to have a technical SEO audit done, probably with full SEO audit.
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
-
Include Site Name in Page Titles or not
i would like to ask if it is a good practice or not to Include Site Name in Page Titles. My page is not selling products it is about plagiarism checker tool. i will give one example in one page we are writing about the plagiarism types so the page title is plagiarism types and then is the site name. what is the better practice? Keep it or not? thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | anavasis3 -
Why does Google pick a low priority page on my site?
Hi Guys. One of my pages ranks quite well for "mid year diaries 14-15" on Google. The problem is it's a really specific product page (A4, Hardback, day-to-a-page diary I think). It would be much better for the user to land on our mid-year diaries category, not really deep into the site. Why is Google prioritizing this product page over our general 'mid year diaries' category? Especially when the category would relate to the search more accurately? I work for TOAD diaries and I think our page rank is 10 for this search. Eagerly awaiting some insight 🙂 Thanks in advance everyone! Isaac.
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
SEO targeted text on Mobile Site Version
Hey Mozzers, I run SEO for a retail site www.uncommongoods.com. We are building a mobile version of our site on m.uncommongoods.com On each of the category pages of www.uncommongoods.com, we have included a few lines of text at the bottom of the page to get some of our target keywords into the body. As an example, if you look at this page: http://www.uncommongoods.com/office/journals-stationery/journals You'll see this copy at the bottom: "Find unique journals and diaries at UncommonGoods. Our creative journal gifts are great for marking special occasions with sentimental keepsakes." We are debating whether or not to remove this copy on the category pages of our mobile site, just to keep the pages as clean as possible. Would there be any risk in leaving this out ? Thanks for your help on this! -Zack
On-Page Optimization | | znotes0 -
How important are internal pages to overall site rank?
This seems like it should be an easy question (and probably is), but it has stumped a few of us over the past few days. Here's the scenario: We have a site that we are trying to optimize to rank well for a set of keywords. We have a lot of internal pages that are important to users when they visit the site (case studies, for example), but they aren't the pages that we want people to find when they search for our primary keywords. Our question is, is it valuable to optimize those internal pages for our keywords? In other words, will having a lot of internal pages that mention our keywords affect how well our overall site ranks for those keywords? Or, is it only important to have one "hero" page for our important keywords? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | omg_jlsa0 -
Can Page Authority of a site be higher than its Domain Authority?
I own a website called Takeyourtips.com. While doing a search no Google, I found that the page authority of the home page (31) is higher than the domain authority (23). I was wondering if it's really possible because my understanding was page authority of a page is determined by its domain authority. Therefore, it the domain authority of a website is 23, none of its page could have a higher page authority. Plus, upon consulting an SEO expert, I was told that neither Domain Authority or Page Authority of a page carries any importance as far as higher ranking of a website is concerned. Is this true? Thanks in advance for the answers. Cheers, Sushant large
On-Page Optimization | | suskanchan0 -
Can I add a blog to different pages of my site?
I would like to ad a blog to a few different pages of my site, is this possible? I would prefer it to not be a stand alone blog, because I am pretty sure it would begin to outrank my landing pages in search results. I built my site using dreamweaver, but I have seen a reference somewhere to a utility for adding a word press blog to an existing site? This site seems to be doing what I had in mind? http://www.drynclean.com/
On-Page Optimization | | ayetti0 -
My site has been dropping, not sure why!
My site has been dropping in the rankings, not sure - my metrics seem better than my competitors. Historically I have been a very stable #2 for my main term, but now it's down to 7! According to SEO Moz, my domain authority is 32, while my better performing competitors are are 26, 11, and 1! Have more links than they do. Trying to think it through, not sure what is happening. My home page bounces at a low 20%-ish, other Google Analytics are good. I have a company Facebook account, occasionally upload YouTube vids, do online press releases, etc. I do have to target several metros scattered across the state, while my competitors usually focus on one major metro. I do have some SEO Moz errors, which focus on dup content due to our web editor's naming system. An example would be domain.com/keyword-keyword-i-14 vs. domain/differnet keyword-different better keyword-i-14. 14 would be the actual page number. Our system lets me change the page title keywords, as I've added new links and pages over the years there are some dupes. The only major change is I've added a password protected section for sales rep materials. The hosting/web guru firm we use has assured me Google doesn't see pages behind the password portection. Not sure if Google is testing a new SERP formula. All social media or non-website results seem to have dropped out of search for my terms. Just local business sites like mine and some directory sites remain. Any advice or private consult would be greatly appreciated as I am a ... self taught 'OneManBand' for high tech marketing in our company. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | OneManBand0 -
Three Sites or One?
I have a client who provides three distinct, although related, services. Some of his competitors only provide one of those services, and thus their sites are more saturated with that particular service. Would it be best to develop three different sites optimized for each particular service, or could I achieve the same effect by optimizing different sections of one site for each service?
On-Page Optimization | | kscotbarr0