SEO When Teaching English To Russians

[smilinggardener]

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

[gfiorelli1]

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