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
-
Does Google's algo look at all traffic mediums with regs to onpage metrics or only organic traffic metrics?
Hi folks, This is something I've pondered for a while. I've ask a couple of Googlers but no reponse yet and I don't I'll get one! In your opinion, do you think Google looks at on page metrics like bounce rate for example from all traffic mediums (organic, paid, email, social referral etc etc) or they only look at on page metrics from organic traffic? I'm not talking about direct correlations from other mediums. I'm only talking about when a user lands on a website, do the actions they take matter with regards to Google's search algo no matter of the referring medium, or do Google only look at onpage metrics on visits which came to the site via organic search as a medium. Option 1 As a very simplified example: Google gives extra weight in the SERPs to website A which has an average bounce rate of 30% from all mediums compared to website B which has a bounce rate of 50% from all mediums. Option 2 Google gives extra weight in the SERPs to website A which has an average bounce rate of 30% from organic traffic only compared to website B which has a bounce rate of 50% from organic traffic only. I'm not sure if anyone outside Google has the answer/proof of this but was keen to get other people's thoughts. If you think the also uses one or the other, can you give an insights/proof of one or the other? For me it would make sense for them only to use onpage metrics from sessions which came from organic seach traffic, but who knows! Merci buckets, Gill.
On-Page Optimization | | Cannetastic0 -
Stumped: Site No Longer Showing Up for Important Keywords
URL is: www.radianceofpalmbeach.comGreetings All:I have been working on our company's website for months, and I am finally at wit's end. The site was very out-of-date and had unfortunately been built upon some bad links before my arrival. My partner and I have redone the site with SEO best practices in mind: we created new content for the pages, and have been working diligently on correctly organizing the site. Despite everything we have done, our site has plummeted since September in terms of organic search. Here are some of my suspects: Panda/Penguin: a lot of the content of the old site had been copied. We did our best to make our content helpful and original, but I'm not sure we did enough. Also, many backlinks were suspect. I disavowed all that I didn't like Dec. 8. I have seen minor improvement, but not much. Name Change: Around late October, coinciding with one of the algorithm changes, the doctor insisted we change our name from New Radiance Med Spa to New Radiance Cosmetic Center. We noticed overnight tumbling, but it literally happened at the same time many were complaining about Penguin. Pages too far removed from root directory?: We tried to silo the site by category to make it specific, but I'm not sure if we went too far from the root directory. For example, our botox page is: http://www.radianceofpalmbeach.com/services/injectables/neuromodulators/botox-cosmetic/ -- Should it just be ./botox ? Everything is only one link away, so we didn't foresee a problem. No alternate forms of navigation: Our navigation is solely drop-down. Content Issues: Since the site launch, my boss has changed the organization of the site around. I don't think this should be a problem, but I honestly don't know. Technical Issues: We use a Wordpress site, and the designer has been pretty good about making the site clean and without errors, but perhaps there is something I am overlooking? ??: Despite these issues, I feel like our site should be considered better than many of our competitors who nonetheless perform much better than we do on important keyword searches. Type in "liposuction palm beach" or "botox palm beach" and we don't even come on page 1, whereas we used to dominate. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, as, like I said, we are stumped. I feel like I have looked up every possible problem, and with the above list, we feel frozen as to which direction to turn.Thanks in advance,Michael
On-Page Optimization | | mikedelseo0 -
Duplicate Content from on Competitor's site?
I've recently discovered large blocks of content on a competitors site that has been copy and pasted from a client's site. From what I know, this will only hurt the competitor and not my client since my guy was the original. Is this true? Is there any risk to my client? Should we take action? Dino
On-Page Optimization | | Dino640 -
Hi.. Can a E-commerce site have a Google Authorship.
Hi Can a E-commerce site have a Google Authorship, and if yes i have learned google requires a face for Google Authorship, as they are applying Facial recognition with the authorship. If So, how can an e-commerce website have an individual's face. ?
On-Page Optimization | | usef4u0 -
Site Downtime - Will pages be reindexed?
I recently had site downtime of about 10 days for a site I'm working on which is about 6 months old. There were naturally many page not found errors in webmaster tools as google had tried to crawl the site during the downtime but I've noticed that google has now dropped some of the pages. Are they likely to be reindexed? Google has crawled some of my pages today but as yet the ones that have been dropped from the index haven't reappeared. (the site has been live again for a week). Should they reappear when the pages are next crawled?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Add Rel Canonical to all pages on my site (Magento)
Can anyone guide me as to how to add the REL CANONICAL feature to every page on my website (Magento shopping cart) Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | lacx.com0 -
How to use good keyword URL to help main site
Hi. I'm a long time ecommerce guy and starting a third business. The main site URL is the name of the new business but I also purchased a .com URL that is our #1 keyword to target. So I need to know the best strategy to use the keyword url for helping with getting a top ranking for that keyword. I'm curious if I can or should build out the keyword URL site for the search engines and use a 301 redirect. Can you get top ranking for a site that just redirects? Anyway, I guess you get my question. This keyword gets a ton of perfectly targeted traffic so seems like a goldmine if I work it right. Thanks very much.
On-Page Optimization | | jimmyseo1
