SEO When Teaching English To Russians
-
My girlfriend is from Saint Petersburg, Russia and now lives in Toronto, Canada. She's been teaching English to Russians for 3 years in person and on Skype, and now wants to start a website to get more 1-on-1 clients and sell online courses, which I have a lot of experience in.
If you don't feel like reading my notes below, I'll summarize my main questions here: Would you lean to creating the site more in English or Russian language or both equally... with a .com or .ru or both (2 sites)... hosted in the U.S. or Russia?
I've been reading a number of excellent threads about strategies and tactics for online marketing in multiple language (including some here on Moz), but am still confused about how best to approach this. Here are some notes:
-Some prospects will search for her services in English and some in Russian (probably more in Russian).
-If I build her a site primarily in English, she can take advantage of my experience in English keyword research, SEO, competitor research, and so on. If I build her a site primarily in Russian, I can still do those things, but not as efficiently or effectively.
-If I were thinking first and foremost of our users, which is obviously a good place to start, the site would be in both English and Russian, but I've read that if a site has both English and Russian text, and is a .com instead of a .ru, that can really hurt its chances of ranking in Russia's Yandex search engine, which is used more in Russia than Google. Along the same lines, although most SEO sites are saying that it doesn't matter where you host a website these days, an exception seems to be that Yandex does reward sites that are hosted locally. Are these assertions true?
-At first I assumed that organic search competition is lower in the Russian language, but I don't really know. I've also read that Yandex really rewards older domains and that it can be hard to beat them, which means competition may be quite high.
So my questions again are: Would you lean to creating the site more in English or Russian or both... with a .com or .ru or both (2 sites)... hosted in the U.S. or Russia?
Thanks in advance!
Phil -
If your girlfriend wants to target Russian living in Russia, then you have to go for a .ru domain name and optimize the website thinking at Yandex as main search engine, even though Google is growing very fast right now in Russia too, especially thanks to Android Smartphones, which obviously have Google as main search engine.
Here you have the Yandex guide for webmasters.
The problem of a .ru domain is that - in Google - it is automatically geo-targeting Russia, so it would be impossible (or very hard) to have a subfolder like www.domain.ru/en/ being able to rank well in Google.com or Google.ca.
For that reason, my suggestions is to create the English version using a generic domain.
Regarding to your question about hosting the .ru domain in Russia or in the US, you could go for a third option:
Hosting in the USA but with a Russian Ip.
Finally, ranking in russian in Yandex is not all that easy as you may imagine
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
-
Redirect to 'default' or English (/en) version of site?
Hi Moz Community! I'm trying to work through a thorny internationalization issue with the 'default' and English versions of our site. We have an international set-up of: www.domain.com (in english) www.domain.com/en www.domain.com/en-gb www.domain.com/fr-fr www.domain.com/de-de and so on... All the canonicals and HREFLANGs are set up, except the English language version is giving me pause. If you visit www.domain.com, all of the internal links on that page (due to the current way our cms works) point to www.domain.com/en/ versions of the pages. Content is identical between the two versions. The canonical on, say, www.domain.com/en/products points to www.domain.com/products. Feels like we're pulling in two different directions with our internationalization signals. Links go one way, canonical goes another. Three options I can see: Remove the /en/ version of the site. 301 all the /en versions of pages to /. Update the hreflangs to point the EN language users to the / version. **Redirect the / version of the site to /en. **The reverse of the above. **Keep both the /en and the / versions, update the links on / version. **Make it so that visitors to the / version of the site follow links that don't take them to the /en site. It feels like the /en version of the site is redundant and potentially sending confusing signals to search engines (it's currently a bit of a toss-up as to which version of a page ranks). I'm leaning toward removing the /en version and redirecting to the / version. It would be a big step as currently - due to the internal linking - about 40% of our traffic goes through the /en path. Anything to be aware of? Any recommendations or advice would be much appreciated.
International SEO | | MaxSydenham0 -
International SEO & Duplicate Content: ccTLD, hreflang, and relcanonical tags
Hi Everyone, I have a client that has two sites (example.com & example.co.uk) each have the same English content, but no hreflang or rel="canonical" tags in place. Would this be interpreted as duplicate content? They haven't changed the copy to speak to specific regions, but have tried targeting the UK with a ccTLD. I've taken a look at some other comparable question on MOZ like this post - > https://moz.com/community/q/international-hreflang-will-this-handle-duplicate-content where one of the answers says **"If no translation is happening within a geo-targeted site, HREFLANG is not necessary." **If hreflang tags are not necessary, then would I need rel="canonical" to avoid duplicate content? Thanks for taking the time to help a fellow SEO out.
International SEO | | ccox10 -
Has any one seen negative SEO effects from using Google Translate API
We have a site currently in development that is using the Google Translate API and I am having a massive issue getting screaming frog to crawl and all of our non-native English speaking employees have read through the translated copy in their native language and the general consensus is it reads at a 5th grade level at best. My questions to the community is, has anyone implemented this API on a site and has it a) helped with gaining traffic from other languages/countires and b) has it hurt there site from an SEO standpoint.
International SEO | | VERBInteractive0 -
Shall I automatically redirect international visitors from www.domain.com to e.g. www.domain.com/es? What is best SEO practice?
We have chosen the one domain approach with our international site having different language versions in subdirectory of main domain:
International SEO | | lcourse
www.domain.com/es
www.domain.com/it
etc. What is SEO-wise best practice for implementing international index pages. I see following options: entering www.domain.com will display without redirection the index page in language of user (e.g based on IP or browser) in www.domain.com
Example: www.booking.com entering www.domain.com will always show English index page.
Additionally one may display a message in the header if IP from other country with link to other language version.
Example: www.apple.com entering www.domain.com will always redirect automatically to country specific subdirectory based on IP
Example: www.samsung.com Any thoughts/suggestions on what may be best solution from a SEO perspective? For a user I believe options 1) & 3) are preferable.0 -
International SEO
Hi If you were developing a US version of an existing UK site then is this the correct format/instructions for on-page SEO. Ive taken quite a lot from Aleydas great post: http://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist but just want to confirm below is a good overall checklist to provide to clients developers ? Create US & UK country & language subfolders such as: domain.com/en-us/ and domain.com/en-gb/ Add 'rel=alternatehreflang' attribute according to google guidelines Add individual site map to each subfolder or will the hreflang attribute do or vice versa or both best? Don't redirect users via IP sniffing their location and serving up country/language version. Instead obviously link between language/country versions with a crawlable and very visible menu. Use the meta content language/country by adding the 'country-language' meta-tag in your html head Create individual profiles in GWT & GA for each country/language version and geotarget accordingly Localise content: spelling, currency, contacts etc Anything else re on-page/technical im missing ? Many Thanks
International SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
Dan [edited to fix formatting]0 -
Alternate tag. Anybody had success getting English websites only with localized currency served with alternate tag?
I have an English website with USD prices and US phone.
International SEO | | lcourse
Via currency dropdown visitors in Ireland can choose EUR as currency, visitors from Denmark Danish crown etc and via GEO IP I also serve local contact phone numbers. So I though it made sense to define this with the alternate tags, but now after several months google still does not pickup these pages in local searches. Did anybody have success with getting a website just with currency parameter ranked locally using the alternate tag? Does it help to have also static links (not only dropdown links) to currency versions on the page? Any other thing that could help to have google pick these up? Below my code sample:0 -
International SEO | URL Structure
I'm looking for advice/point of view for setting up international domains. I.e. sub-domains, ccTLD, etc. At the 10,000 ft. view - the client (international retail company) is trying to decide which type of URL structure to use in their new platform: Option 1: Root Domain ccTLD - www.brand.ca, www.brand.fr, etc. Option 2: Subdomains - fr.brand.com, ca.brand.com, au.brand.com Option 3: Subfolders - ]www.brand.com/ca/, ]www.brand.com/au/ Consider these scenarios/questions and use to help decide which URL structure makes sense: 1) I'm an Aussie in Australia and I do a Google search on Hank Myer Aron, which is a huge seller in the U.S. and also included at the Australia locale site. If we go with subfolders, am I likely to see the U.S. Aron page higher in my search results than the Australia Aron page? Or is the U.S. site not a factor in a search done outside the U.S.? If we use subfolders AND geo-detection, does this bump the ranking of the locale page? Do sites using ccTLDs always get ranked above those that don't? For example, if an Australian dealer selling Aron has URLs dealer.com.au/..., would their pages rank ahead of hankmyer.com/au/...? If we went the ccTLD route, would the Aron page at hankmyer.com.au take precedence over the U.S. page? (Again, assuming U.S. site is relevant in this scenario.) 2) I'm a Frenchman in France searching on Hank Myer Aron. If we use subfolders AND an alias URL that's translated to French (brand.com/fr/produits/sieges/sieges-aron), would we expect the page rank to be comparable to using the ccTLD and/or expect greater trust than just using subfolders without translated URLs? Do translated URLs have any mitigating affect on duplicate page content? Which URL strategy is best choice from a SEO standpont?
International SEO | | CrownPartners0 -
Does the location of my Domain Registrar affect SEO?
Does the location of my Domain Registrar affect SEO? For example, if my hosting company is in the U.S., but the domain registrar is overseas. Also, is it better to have both services be met by one company?
International SEO | | greenfoxone0