International SEO: best practices for local variants of the same language?
-
We are translating our site into 17 different languages, including local variants of the same language (i.e. Mexican Spanish and Spain Spanish, Canadian English and British English, etc). Should we add all of these local variants to our site?
We don't have the marketing / link building budget (or business need) to put these all on separate ccTLDs, so we are using country-specific subfolders instead (example.com/es/).
The translations will be of exceptional quality. Our main goal is to pull in some additional traffic from these translations. If we add these local variants, do you think we can expect to see traffic from these different countries (additional traffic from Canada, England, etc)?
Any advice / input would be appreciated.
-
This may be late, but yes you would need to add each sub-directory to GWT to set their location.
If you've already claimed the main site, it should automatically verify the sub-directories for you.
More info (check out the video):
-
Hi Gianluca that's really interesting, I didn't know about the possibility of differently configure folders inside the same domain in GWT. I always thought it was possible to set up only the main level, how can you achieve that? do you create different profiles for each folder?
-
What mememax said is substantially correct:
use hreflang in order to specify to Google what URLs it must shows depending on the language and country of the users. You can find the Google specifications here.
Another thing I strongly suggest you, and not said by mememax, is to geo-target every subfolder to its corresponding countries in GWT > Settings
Finally, even though you don't have the budget for local link building, and even though the link equity will pass throughout every country subfolder (hence from the one you yes have the budget for link building), I suggest you to do a minimum of link building, in order to give at least some original link equity strength to every subfolder.
Ah... in the case of Bing, the rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X" doesn't work. Instead you must follow this procedure described by Duane Forrester.
-
I'll advice to use the hreflang tag on each page to be sure that google know ehich language are you targetin for especially for english and spanish having those languages different variations from one country to another.
maybe you'll see a swap for local search engines for your base language which I suppose is english and gain some additional trafic from other languages. You'll start ranking in languages you disn't have before so extra traffic is highly possible.
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
-
Incorrect homepage country variant appearing in search resutls
Hi, Background I have an international site with 32 country homepages within the same domain: eg www.domain.com/en-gb/
International SEO | | coma99
www.domain.com/fr-fr/
www.domain.com/de-de/
www.domain.com/es-es/ and so forth We use IP redirection on the root www.domain.com (which has no HTML page of its own) to divert the user to their relevant country homepage. Within each country homepage we include: (a canonical link to itself) ... (hreflang alternates to all instances of other homepages including itself ) Our Google Crawl bot is located in Germany and so when it crawls our root www.domain.com it takes the title and description from its destination url which in crawlbots case is www.domain.com/de-de/ because of the IP redirect. What is the problem I am trying to solve? Every variation of local Google results (eg UK/FR/IT/US) displays at the top the crawled root www.domain.com page with German title/description. How can I stop this happening? Surely adding appropriate hrefs and canonicals to every homepage instance is sufficient for Google to display to you your relevant country homepage variant instead!? Thanks0 -
Google Search Console International Targeting - Works for Hungary, but not Ireland - Why?
company.com (root)
International SEO | | scottclark
USA - lang="en" | GSC target: USA (shows US site in SERPs for "companyname" search)
company.com/hungary
Hungary - lang="hu" | GSC target: Hungary (shows Hungarian site in SERPs for "companyname" search)
AWESOMENESS company.com/ireland
Ireland - lang="en" | GSC target: Ireland (shows US site (doh!) in SERPs "companyname" search)
NOT RIGHT! It is our theory [please weigh in!] that because we don't have a company.com/usa folder, the TLD targeting (EN) is overriding other English language sites in some manner. In other words, the reason it's not overriding Hungary is because it's a different language. What must we do to get the Irish site ranked for "companyname" searches and to show by default in Ireland?0 -
How to Localise per Region (Europe, America, APAC, EMEI) and not per country as best SEO practise?
Hi SEO expertises! I am currently working with a client that initially have an English website targeting UK users but want to expand their market into four new regions (Europe, America, APAC and EMEI) keeping English as a main language. I would like to request your help here as I told the client ISO location and hreflang it will be just possible per language and they must need to localise each English region with local keywords, however I would like to double check if it will be any way (Sitemap, Hreflang) we can tell Google we are targeting per region and not per country? Thanks a lot!
International SEO | | Atalig20 -
Splitting a site into 2 international sites
Hi all, I have a client that currently has a .com domain that ranks in both the US and the UK for various search terms. They have identified a need to provide different information for UK and US visitors which will require 2 versions of all pages. If we set up a .co.uk domain and keep the .com obviously that will be a brand new UK site which will have zero rankings. Any suggestions as to the best way to introduce this second version of the content without losing UK rankings? Thanks
International SEO | | danfrost0 -
Sitelinks in multiple language
Hello ! In a french browser & french Google interface with no browsing history, I have the french version of my website indexed, but the site links coming along with it are in English ! Is there any way to combat this? Note - we use a 302 language re-direction. See screenshot here: http://bit.ly/25kViB0
International SEO | | TechWyse0 -
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 -
Russian SEO: Do you know some good sources with tips and news about Yandex?
We are launching our site in Russia - and basically I have no experience in Russian SEO! Could you please recommend me some good English sources with news, tips and hints about Yandex? Basically I am looking the Russian SEOmoz 🙂 Thanks!
International SEO | | jorgediaz0 -
Internationalization and SEO
Hi Everyone, This is my first post in this new Q & A section!! This interface looks great!! Now onto the question.... We have www.example.com in English that has 50,000+ URLs. We are in the process of building a new site example.de targeting German users. The German site (www.example.de) will be a mirror of the English site at launch as we want to give a full experience to people visiting the .de domain. However, not all pages will be localized as we can't support that. We are planning on localizing the core sets of pages (~500) and leaving the rest in English. Post launch, we will have additional milestones to localize the remaining pages until the entire site is localized (converted to German). Is this the correct way to go? Will this cause duplicate content issue?
International SEO | | Amjath
Will adding "rel=canonical" tag on these pages solve the purpose? Thanks for the help!0