How to SEO for Spanish-Speaking People in California
-
I found myself in need of translating our current website into Spanish language so that we can target the Spanish-speaking population of L.A. and surrounding areas.
I have several questions:
1. What should my url structure be? ex: domain.com/es/subpage
would that work?2. Do I need to worry about any header information? Do I just translate the whole thing into Spanish with meta info etc..? What about rel="canonical", what do I need to do with the spanish translated pages?
Any other tips for SEO in Spanish? I plan on hiring a translator to translate the entire website into Spanish and thought about putting it in its own sub-directory, for example: domain.com/es/
Thanks for looking!
-
Glad I could help. If you any other assistance, don't hesitate to drop me a line.
-
Zeph, great advice on their heritage and translation not being literal. I did not think about this...
-
The advice that eyepac is offering you is pretty sound.
Geotarget for US? Check
Hreflang? Check My go to resource for how to do this is http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2232347/A-Simple-Guide-to-Using-relalternate-hreflangx
Using a subdirectory rather than a subdomain is the right way to go for sure. It allows your authority to trickle down to your Spanish site, making it significantly easier to rank.
What I would add is that translation is a tricky business...so keep the following in mind:
The vast majority of Spanish speakers in Los Angeles are of Mexican heritage. Make sure your translator is also.
Make them understand that the translation should not be literal. Otherwise you end up with some terrible misunderstandings and terrible text.
Have someone vet the translation before you put it up on your site. It could be a different translator, or if possible a current Spanish speaking customer (they will be in the best position to judge whether or not the translation is adequate.
Hope this helps, feel free to ask follow up questions!
-
I plan on hiring someone who has done it in my niche. Your post is too long to read to be honest, but thanks for the info. It's my fault I'm lazy that way
-
Don't forget to make sure the translation is well done.
See my blog post.
-
Cool, thanks.
-
Hi,
First of all if you don't want to target LATAM or Spain you will need to setup in Web master Tools the target as US - even if the language is spanish.
Also very important is the use of hreflang attribute that you need to setup on those translated pages - this is very important. For more on hreflang see the google official resource at: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
As far as structure /es like you've mention should be more then fine. No need to have any special settings or anything but is good to have everything in a separate folder.
Just my 2c.
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
-
International SEO - Alternatives to Automatic IP re-direct
Hello, When doing international SEO I've read that it's not good practice to automatically re-direct users to the correct part of the website based on their IP address. But what alternatives are there to this? Let's say you're targeting the US and the UK through multiregional SEO. What can you do to ensure that users from the US go to the US sub-directory and that users from the UK go to the UK sub-directory? In Moz's international SEO guide it says that: "If you choose to try to guess at the user’s language preference when they enter your site, you can use the browser’s language setting or the IP address and ask the user to confirm the choice. Using JavaScript to do this will ensure that Googlebot does not get confused. Pair this with a good XML sitemap and the user can have a great interaction. Plus, the search engines will be able to crawl and index all of your translated content." Can anyone explain this further? Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance
International SEO | | SEOCT0 -
International SEO Question: Using hreflang tags across two different TLDs.
Hi! My UK based company just recently made the decision to let the US market operate their ecommerce business independently. Initially, both markets were operating off the same domain using sub-directories (i.e: www.brandname.com/en-us/ , www.brandname.com/en-gb/ ) Now that the US team have broken away from the domain - they are now using www.brandnameUSA.com while the UK continues to use www.brandname.com/en-gb/. The content is similar across both domains - however, the new US website has been able to consolidate several product variations onto single product pages where the UK website is using individual product pages for each variation. We have placed a geo-filter on the main domain which is 301 redirecting North American traffic looking for www.brandname.com to www.brandnameUSA.com However, since the domain change has taken place, product pages from the original domain are now indexing alongside the new US websites product pages in US search results. The UK website wants to be the default destination for all international traffic. My question is - how do we correctly setup hrlang tags across two separate TLDs and how do we handle a situation where multiple product pages on the "default" domain have been consolidated into one product page on the new USA domain? This is how we are currently handling it: "en-us" href="https://www.BRANDNAMEUSA.com/All-Variations" /> href="https://www.BRANDNAMEUSA.com/All-Variations" />
International SEO | | alexcbrands0 -
International SEO strategy for an ecommerce with 3 languages.
Hi all, I've an ecommerce which ships worldwide and we maintain 3 languages, spanish, english and french. My main business is in Spain, so spanish will be shown in the root domain: http://domain.com/. English will have the /en/ subdomain and french the /fr/ subdomain. After some research, I've concluded that the best strategy for my business is the following. 1º- Translate all the URL's to the correct language, since now are in spanish. 2º- Implement Hreflang tag (with self-reference): Note: Due to the "universality" of english, Does it make sense? Or should I use spanish as default since it's the most important one. 3º- Create the 3 sites in Search Console and only geo targetting french sobdomain to France. Since I really want to boost in France rankings. Do you consider this as a contradiction with ? I could also target country in the hreflang. 4º- Add language tag in each language version: <meta name="language" content="spanish">in http://domain.com/</meta name="language"> <code class="broncode"><meta name="language" content="english">in http://domain.com/en/</meta name="language"></code> <code class="broncode"><meta name="language" content="french">in http://domain.com/fr/</meta name="language"></code> <code class="broncode">5º- Use canonical tag together with hreflang.</code> ``` Any opinion will be very appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance! Best regards.
International SEO | | footd0 -
Can multiple hreflang tags point to one URL? International SEO question
Moz, Hi Moz, Can multiple hreflang tags point to a single URL? For example, if I have a Canadian site (www.example.com/ca) that targets French and English speakers can I have the following: or would I use: Any insight would be very helpful and greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance!
International SEO | | DA20131 -
Wordpress international SEO Plugin - recommendations needed
Hi Mozzers, I am designing the web architecture for a international website and will be using Wordpress. Can anyone recommend a plugin that lets me SEO for all countries? I have used Yoast many times but it does not seem to work for International Web SEO Architectures. Thanks Carla Here is an idea of what I was thinking of doing Homepage.com Irish-homepage.ie or Homepage.com/ie Irish-Subpages.ie or Homepage.com/ie/subpage Irish-Subpages.ie or Homepage.com/ie/subpage Irish-Subpages.ie or Homepage.com/ie/subpage UK homepage.co.uk or Homepage.com/uk UK-subpages.co.uk or Homepage.com/uk/subpage UK-subpages.co.uk or Homepage.com/uk/subpage
International SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
SEO Company in Asia
Hi All. I have a client looking to expand their industrial services to southeast Asia (Vietnam and Indonesia specifically right now). Does anyone know of an SEO/Online Marketing firm local to that region that may be able to help them network with businesses and industries there? I've gone through the SEOmoz member database and reached out to a couple people with agencies in that area but never heard back from them. I personally thought a local firm would be more beneficial to the client but I'm also open to suggestions on ways that we might be able to help them market their services online from the US. Thanks so much! Megan
International SEO | | ILM_Marketing0 -
Subdomains vs ccTLD in International SEO
I'm interested to see if anyone has any additional thoughts or recent experience on subdomains vs ccTLD for International SEO. An article I found on this site is from March 2011, so just wanted to check if this is still relevant? http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview
International SEO | | edwardlewis0 -
International SEO - auto geo-targetting
I read with interest the recent post on international SEO and the top level domain architecture approaches to local content: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview#jtc135670 The issue I have is a little more complex: The business sells a wide variety of products (37) but one is by far and away the biggest and most popular. This means that due to the link profile of the various country sites and HQ site, search engines categorise the site according to this product (this is easily seen with the Google Adplanner) and the other product lines suffer as a result. The current architecture is to have a .com site and then individual ccTLD country sites, again with all products on each site. This creates an issue as in most countries the brand is not strong (compared to the keyword names and search volumes of the products) and so it is not that effective in generating organic traffic. The .com hogs much of the inbound links and the country sites themselves are not that well optimised for a number of reasons. A proposed solution has been to leverage the strength of the .com and the search volume for the product names, and to produce thematic sites based on each product: productA.brand.com
International SEO | | StevieCC
productB.brand.com
productC.brand.com In this way, the sites, content and link profiles are aligned around the more desirable products and we can expect improved organic search performance as a result (or at least ensure relevant traffic finds the relevant content fast). In terms of providing localised content, the plan was to use content mirroring and to then assign each content mirror to a specific geo-location using the webmaster tools console (and other SE equivilents). This is shown I think in one of Rand's videos. ProductA.brand.com/de/de Germany site for product A with unique German content
ProductA.brand.com/fr/fr French site for product A with unique French content This makes economic sense to me as to utilise the ccTLDs would result in hundreds of separate sites with all the licence and server considerations that entails. For example, for product A alone we would have to produce: productA.brand.de
productA.brand.fr
productA.brand.cn
productA.brand.jp
ect ect ect This just would not be sustainable in license/server costs alone across 37 products and 24 countries. However, I saw in a recent presentation at SES London that (auto) geo-targeting is risky, often doesn't work well for SEO and can even be seen as cloaking. I think the above strategy could still work, but perhaps we should avoid the use of auto-geotargetting altogether and hope the search engines alone do their job in getting users to the right content as we optimise the unique content for each country (and if they don't, ensure our desgn, UX and country selectors do the job instead). SEO guru consensus is to use the ccTLD if you own it, but as described above, in the real world that just isn't possible or practical given the company's strategic position. Which leads to the final question- we do own the brand ccTLDs- if they are directed back to the content mirror for the country on the .com, is there any SEO benefit in doing so aside from directing back any link juice associated with the domain)?0