Language Specific Characters in URLs for

[nickspiteri]

Hi People, would really appreciate your advice as we are debating best practice and advice seems very subjective depending if we are talking to our dev or SEO team. We are developing a website aimed at the South American market with content entirely in Spanish.  This is our first international site so our experience is limited.  Should we be using Spanish characters (such as www.xyz.com/contáctanos) in URLs or should we use ASCII character replacements? What are the pros and cons for SEO and usability?

Would really be great to get advice from the Moz community and make me look good at the same time as it was my suggestion  

Nick

[nickspiteri]

Hi Ikkie,

Thank you so much for your prompt reply.  We had already done a website audit on well-known sites in the target country and language and as you mentioned, most well-known sites go down your suggested route.  However, our concern is that most well-known sites do not always adopt on page seo best practice  or in some cases even need to based on the brand equity they enjoy so not sure if we should follow this benchmark or is there a better structure .

[Mustansar]

I would reckon you to use just initial of the language is easy and readable for any visitor regardless if they can read spanish or  not. Furthermore, this approcah is always been adopted by most of well known sites.