Is it advisable to show additionally also English ciity names of American cities in website versions of non-western languages such as Chinese, Japanese etc?

[lcourse]

To my understanding in many Asian languages city names are transcribed as they sound and this can cause confusion especially in the case of lesser known American city names.

So I was planning to put in our international website versions (Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc. ) the English name in brackets after the translated city name in meta title and H1.
However when I checked Tripadvisor and Booking.com I noticed that they do not show the English city name anywhere on their Asian language versions.

Any thoughts?
Would you recommend to  put the English city name in brackets after the translated city name or may it rather hurt our ranking and traffic?

[StephanSolomonidis]

It would be useful to see an example of what you mean, but the answer is probably not. What to do first is:

1. Ensure you set up hreflang correctly, so that Google understands your Chinese-language page on New York and your English-language page on New York are functionally equivalent.
2. Use a good rank tracker, and configure it to check your keywords on each of the country-level Google sites you're interested in (Google.co.kr for Korea, and so on). See whether the correct page is showing up when you track ranks for the foreign-language name, and for the phonetically-translated name.
3. Check Search Console for the appropriate pages, using the country filter to look only at the kinds of queries and clicks you're getting from each of the countries you're interested in. See whether people are actually searching with the Asian-language name for the city, or with a phonetic translation. See whether people are searching for the English name (they might be).
4. If, after looking at your rank tracking and search console results, you think there are many people in Asia putting English-language city names into their queries, at that point you could consider going ahead with this idea. Even then, try it on just a few of your city pages at first—not all of them—and continue to refer back to your rank tracker. What you don't want to see is any direct competition between different language versions of the same page, in the same SERP.

[benesmartin]

Hey there,

I wouldn't put the English versions in the brackets.

It'd make the H1 much longer and there'd be many titles with the same KW's in them.

I don't think it'd hurt SEO as much but it'd be quite confusing regarding UX.

Hope it helps. Cheers, Martin