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?
-
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? -
It would be useful to see an example of what you mean, but the answer is probably not. What to do first is:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
-
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
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
-
Changing the language of the website meta title and description?
Hello, Moz community! I'm planning to change the language of my website title and description from English to rank better for queries on the local language. Do you think this would increase the local language ranking? And in case I need to switch back to English, let's say in 2021, would it be difficult to regain the current rankings? Please let me know if you have any thoughts on this. Thank you!
International SEO | | vhubert2 -
Can I use rel="alternate" language tags on multiple domains?
On a page with the domain "www.example-1.com.br" (for pt-BR) I will include the following tags: That will work?
International SEO | | Ewerton.RD0 -
How to deal with disproportional content investment for a ccTLD for a multi-language country,
We have a website for the Belgium market, serving content and products on be/nl (Dutch/Flemmish Belgium) and .be/fr (French Belgium). However, as a Dutch-based company you can see our primary focus and objective is to serve content to Dutch Belgium rather than French Belgium. I wonder if, and so, what are the downsides are of only investing in half of the site?
International SEO | | Marketing-Omoda
Does it hurt my general .be Google rankings if we put a lot of effort in .be/nl but far less in .be/fr ? (we used to have a ccTLD .fr as well, but pulled the plug because it wasn't profitable.
our belgium website is profitable for Dutch speaking part of Belgium but now we would like to expand, and enhance rankings. We're investing heavily in (local) brand awareness and partnerships, and content marketing for the Dutch part.0 -
Will hreflang with a language and region allow Google to show the page to all users of that language regardless of region?
I'm launching translations on a website with the first translation being Brazilian Portuguese. If I use the following hreflang: If a user is outside of Brazil and has their browser language set to just Portuguese (Not Portuguese (Brazil)) will Google still serve them the Portuguese version of my pages in search results?
International SEO | | Brando160 -
My site is not showing on google.com ?
My website is not showing at all on google.com searches under search terms. It is showing if i search for my domain (xyz.com) but not by keywords. Searching by keywords and search terms shows my website on yahoo , bing and non US oogle as google.co.uk or google.com.pk on first page. Would appreciate any help in trying to understand why this is happening? The website is medicare.md. if you search for term "medicare doctors PG county maryland" it is #1 in bing and yahoo but not even showing on google.com first TEN pages, although not banned. Interestingly if you do that search on google.co.pk it is #4. Quite Puzzuling !! Would appreciate any help or advice . Sherif Hassan
International SEO | | sherohass0 -
New website coming soon
Currently I'm optimizing content for Anton Laurentiu and I'm doing some keyword strategy, link building... What would be the best way to target his photography and retouching services? He's based in Romania but also able to travel across Europe. Establish the website on the Romanian market (romanian language) or do a research at a larger scale? Thanks.
International SEO | | clotairedamy0 -
Country name displayed after domain name in google SERP
our online shop targets clients in the US and worldwide (same URL - no subdirectories - currency changes based on IP). when searching in google.ie or google.no for our site google displays in the SERPS "US" or "United States" after the URL for our site, but for most other US competitors it does not show the country in the SERPS. I deleted our google places listing 2 weeks ago, since I suspected it may be related, but no change so far. In google webmaster tools we have targeted the shop domain to United States, which may be another factor. Unfortunately we can not undo this setting since without it our google US ranking for the most relevant competitive keyword drops from position 8 to position 100+. Server location is in Germany which despite lots of US links and US contact info and USD currency appparently makes google think that the site is not targeting the US. Does anybody know what triggers the country name in the SERPS (google places or webmaster tools or other) and can give advice if there is any way to get rid of it.
International SEO | | lcourse0 -
I have a site that has 65 different versions of itself.
I've just started managing a site that serves over 50 different countries and the entire web enterprise is being flagged for duplicate content because there is so much of it. What's the best approach to stop this duplicate content, yet serve all of the countries we need to?
International SEO | | Veracity0