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.
-
In that case you can eventually rely on IP detection, and if someone from Belgium is entering on your site, then you can fire an alert, somehow as Amazon does:
"We detected that you are visiting us from Belgium, so we suggest you to visit the French version of our web site".
This, though, does not solve the problem of Belgians speaking Flemish
-
Hi Gianluca,
Thanks for your response! I've read some of your responses about International SEO and they helped me a lot. Actually the idea about keeping my default store without language code came from one of them, I think.
With regards point 3, yes I want to target french people in france, not only because of the language, but the messages about shipping costs, delivery time, ... are related to them too. I understand that someone from belgium will be affected and will view the page in english.
Best regards.
-
Overall a good answer, but I disagree on point 3 in this specific case.
In fact, if Diego is interested only in targeting French users and not - for instance - users from Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria et al), then the hreflang should be consistent with the geo-targeting it is doing on Search Console, hence the hreflang should be "FR-fr" (only French speaking people in France).
-
Hi Dirk,
Thanks for the prompt response!
Actually I thought about the expansion, but I didn't see problem with that structure. If tomorrow I want to target mexico I guess I'd create a subdirectory for them with a spanish version for them, since their spanish have peculiarities. Moreover, with the current hreflang, mexican people querying in spanish would be covered. Anyway, I agree with you, your proposal is clearer. I just wanted to know if I could save tons of 301s (and risk) in the most important version of my web.
2- Thanks for the tools!
3- With in contradiction ,I mean with the fact that I target language in hreflang but country in Google Webmaster Tools.
4- Sure, thanks.
5- Clear now.
Best regards.
-
Hi,
I would personally use domain.com/language for all the sites and use the root to propose the choice of language like this example http://www.volvocars.com/ (which to me seems to be a more future proof solution) if you want to extend your website to other languages or specifically target other regions (example Mexico- which is also Spanish speaking).
1: fully agree - it's much better to translate the url's
2: hreflang - seems ok. You can always check the implementation on http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/ to see if the implementation is ok and/or use this hreflang generator http://www.internationalseomap.com/hreflang-tags-generator/ to create the code.
For the default version - up to you but I would rather go for English as it's more a universal language than Spanish.
3. Geotargeting is not in contradiction to the hreflang tag for the exemple you give - it would have been if you would have set the language to Chinese & geotargeting to France.
4. The language tag you mention doesn't seem to be correct - see also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4417923/html-meta-tag-for-content-language - rather use for Spanish, for French,.. (you could check the specs on this as well: http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-language-declarations
5. You can use self-referencing canonicals - it's however not necessary to use the canonical to set your preferred version (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html)
Hope this helps,
Dirk
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 Two Subdomains Showing Up in Google Search Results
Hi I have a client that is having two subdomains showing up SERP when you Google their name. Here are the details. They have two subdomains us.companyname.com and en.companyname.com us.companyname.com is for the US and has completely different products and content than en.companyname.com en.companyname.com is the site designed for Europe and it is in English. How can I make it so that only the us. version shows up in the search results? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | JohnWeb120 -
How should I handle hreflang tags if it's the same language in all targeting countries?
My company is creating an international version of our site at international.example.com. We are located in the US with our main site at www.example.com targeting US & Canada but offering slightly different products elsewhere internationally. Ideally, we would have hreflang tags for different versions in different languages, however, it's going to be an almost duplicate site besides a few different SKUs. All language and content on the site is going to be in English. Again, the only content changing is slightly different SKUs, they are almost identical sites. The subdomain is our only option right now. Should we implement hreflang tags even if both languages are English and only some of the content is different? Or will having just canonicals be fine? How should we handle this? Would it make sense to use hreflang this way and include it on both versions? I believe this would be signaling for US & Canda visitors to visit our main site and all other users go to the international site. Am I thinking this correctly or should we be doing this a different way?
International SEO | | tcope250 -
International site
Hi everybody,one of my clients has a domain (www.sea-aeroportimilano.it) well ranked on Google.it.
International SEO | | vanGoGh-creative
He has a redirect 302 from www.sea-aeroportimilano.it to www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_it.html. The site has also an english version (www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_en.html).Do you think it's the right setting? What about a 301 from www.sea-aeroportimilano.it to www1.seamilano.eu/landing and after that an authomatic redirect 302 for the language (to www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_it.html or www1.seamilano.eu/landing/index_en.html)?Thanks a lot.Massimiliano0 -
URL structure of international hotel website
Hai all, Question about URL structure of international hotel website in Amsterdam: hotelcitadel.nl. Some information: - Target group are mainly english speaking guests from UK and US. Besides that guests from the Netherlands and some other countries. - Website in 6 languages. - No geo-targetting; just language targetting with hreflang annotations. Current situation: hotelcitadel.nl = dutch language version and hotelcitadel.nl/en = english language version We are thinking about changing this to: hotelcitadel.nl would become english version and hotelcitadel.nl/nl would become the dutch version. Reason: root domain hotelcitadel.nl has by far the most links,and making the root domain the english version could help the rankings in english speaking countries like UK and US. What do you think, would this be a wise idea? Regards, Maurice
International SEO | | mlehr0 -
Researching (and launching a site within) a foreign language market
Morning peeps, A client wants to clone their website for a foreign language market, obviously swapping all English content for whichever language/market they're looking to target. Any advice on how to research a foreign market (when I only speak English), or perhaps any pitfalls to look out for or advice you might have with a launch like this? thanks
International SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Using Javascript to alter ONE or TWO keywords in International Site
Hi, What is the best way to target a language that has slight variations in it without actually targetting specific countries? Scenario: Ecommerce site that sells mobile phones in Spanish, initially created to target Spanish from Spain. We call a mobile phone a "movil" Now we want to target LatinAmerican users, which also use Spanish with variations, the most notable being mobile phone called "celular". We don't want to create specific sites via new ccTLDs, nor subdomains, no directories for each new country, and we want to avoid having two sites - one for spain, one for latinamerica- given that the only major difference is we say MOVIL in spain and CELULAR in LatinAmerica. What is Googles take if we simply decide to modify THAT specific keyword in each page where it is mentioned? Either by: a) Server based. IP Detect. that is, render the page with either one or the other term b) Javascript based. i.e. Have BOTH terms on all pages but using Javascript show/hide according to user preferences. c) Display the keywords with different font sizes/emphasis, depending on the visitor. Any ideas?
International SEO | | doctorSIM0 -
Local SEO - My Ranking depends on City of the user - Rank tracker is failing
Hello, The search results differ completly depending on the user location. The websites yoagbarcelona.org targets poeple from barcelona: Barcelona; User location Barcelona web is on the last position on first page: http://screencast.com/t/ZsIeiCeLRM User location New York 1st. http://screencast.com/t/PzaLbwWW4xx: Also SEO MOZ rank tracker is showing me that im no 1in google.es for yoga barcelona. The problem is that this is only true for users outside the region 😞 The site has very bad ranking in google places and you need to go down to page 10 until my yoga studio shows up in the maps results. I did some hardcore citation building and signed up in almost all local directories that google pulls data from within one month and optimised the google places / plus profile. Please give me some advice how I could overcome the problem.??? Especially on what part should i focus when optimising the page. ??? Are there any other good strategies for getting into google places ??? Do I need more links from local sites or how is this local serps working ???
International SEO | | stereo690 -
International Hub site: .uk vs domain vs subdomain
Financial company with 2 sites: 1- Mybrand.com for the US market.
International SEO | | FXDD
2- global.mybrand.com is the hub for international with selection for 10 languages: drop-down allows selecting between mybrand.jp, mybrand.fr, etc Now we have the opportunity to redesign the site from zero and I am exploring to get rid of the subdomain for the global site What would be your preference to use as the international hub? a) mybrand.co.uk: I have to use lawyers to get the URL from squatter b) mybrandGlobal.com : URL easy to get, and can be geo targeted using google webmaster tools. Cons: It might not rank as well as .co.uk in the UK, which is our biggest market c) global.mybrand.com-- pros: keep using it because it is aged and has some authority. Google might now see subdomains as part of TLD, thus making it a valid way to separate international from US .. Cons: SEO best practices advice to avoid subdomains because it might not pass full link value across domains. There is not really different content the subdomain, it is just the hub for international Thanks in advance for the help0