International SEO
-
My client just launched a german version of their site:
English Version:
www.domain.com/en/....Germain Version:
www.domain.com/de/....Is there a best practice to get the new section of the site indexed in www.google.de? Are you able to submit a different sitemap to each Google domain? How do you go about doing keyword research, its got to be different search trends than google.com, right?
A am complete beginner when it comes to international SEO so any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Regards - Kyle
-
We are fortunate enough to have a native speaker translating for us. Thank you for all your help!
-
Yep, do try to get them to translate the content by a native speaker, not by machine. And optimize like any other page. The new title tags (because of the language) should start showing for searches in that language.
-
Thank you for the awesome and detailed reply. Spoke to the client, they where not looking to target the country specifically. This was just a translation since a large portion of there client base is out of europe (germany specifically).
So the sell barcode scanners for production lines. For their english version of the site we target the different types (camera barcode, laser barcode, etc). So we would optimize the german pages for the same keyword just in the different language?
Thank you for all the help!
-
Hi Kyle!
Before I go into this, let me explain one thing. Search engines operate by country, not language. So if your client has made a German language version of their site, a duplicate of their English site, then it should not just target Germany. There are many other countries and people that speak German. Rather, I would submit a sitemap to google of the german content only and let them crawl the content in German. The indexation should raise over time naturally, and if you track that subfolder in Analytics, you should be able to see what countries are landing on the German language content naturally.
If you wanted to launch a site for the German people (citizens of Deutschland), you should recommend that the content and business be developed for that country and either launched as a subfolder or their domain.de acquired. Only if the content is different because different targeting is required should you launch a site (or area) just for a country. In terms of the TLD, this is simply because if you launch a new domain and target to the country, that is a whole other site that will need link building. That's a lot of work. If you launched to target with a subfolder, you could actually target with WMT to the country Germany, but again, the content needs to be different than the main site.
So ask them what the point is, just to translate or to target Germany. That changes what you should do. But I think it's just the language, so I say let it happen, track indexation and the language subfolder in Analytics and make sure the SEs understand that it's german language content. That'll be shown to users in any country that wish their content to be in German.
Kate
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
-
SEO newbie here - I cannot seem to find the direct answers to a few queries that I have
Hi, Apologies if these are very simple queries, but I cannot seem to find the answers anywhere. I understand meta keywords are pretty much pointless nowadays, however when I run a report on another 'keyword website' - my website only ranks for around 2k keywords where my competitors rank for much more (around 20k). I was just wondering where these keywords are found, as I can only assume that these are meta keywords? The company that I'm working on the SEO for is a holiday agency that specialises in holidays abroad for disabled people, so that means that we have a niche product/service and whilst we rank fairly high for some keywords, we would like to rank higher. How is it possible to work towards ranking higher for particular keywords? When doing keyword research 'disabled holidays' has a lot more search traffic than 'accessible holidays'. We are called Enable Holidays and our main competitors have the words 'disabled' and 'accessible' in their domain's, so I would imagine that it's going to be hard to potentially rank higher than our competitors for these keywords? Could someone put me in the right direction of how you improve rankings in the SERP for certain keyword searches? For example, do we have to write more content on a certain page about a keyword? Do we have to include more long-tail keywords in the content? Any help is appreciated. Thanks
Competitive Research | | enableholidays0 -
Why am I trusting in MozRank and the other scores (from a part time SEO perspective)?
I'll jump right in. I look at the "Competitive Link Analysis" and I see that it says at the top "See the Top 5 contenders for each SEO ranking factor and compare it against the competition." I take them at their word that the 5 links they are displaying are what they think the 5 best links are. On my site they do alright, although my top 3 links are from the same domain, and I know that those links aren't really that great. But they are decent and whatever. The next two are good links. HOWEVER, the links for my competitors are in many cases CRAP. Yet Moz shows them as being the best link my competitor's have. Or at least in this analysis. For example, The number 1 link (supposedly) for a competitor of mine is a link from their own Pinterest page. They have 50 followers. I have personally dug up links they have that are 1000X better than this link. Links so much better that someone just using common sense and no training whatsoever would know that it is a better link. I do get valuable information from this site, but stuff like this makes me wonder if I'd be just fine without any of their link building tools and just going on my own. I do not trust their accuracy. And yes, I've read all the blogs about how they correlate to rankings... Am I missing something? I know you can't be perfect, but this stuff seems to be very poor information in some cases. I have been a member for a year roughly.
Competitive Research | | dellcos0 -
SEO Keyword Research
Hi, We are SEO beginners so please bear with us! We are trying to promote "Web based Invoicing Software". The SEO company we have signed with offer us 5 keywords for the package we are on with them. They have suggested\offered us: 1. Invoicing Software - Fine
Competitive Research | | Studio33
2. Online Invoicing - Fine
3. Online Invoicing Software - Covered by 1 and 2
4. Small Business Invoicing Software - Covered by 1
5. Invoice Template - Fine. Will Invoice templateS be covered on this one too? My question is does number 3 cover number 1,2 & 4 anyway? If so I am thinking to not go for 1,2, & 4 just keep 3 and choose three other new keywords. Would this be a better strategy and "more for our money?" Or, keep 1 and 2 and lose 3 and 4, would that be a good option. So, in summary options are (all assuming keeping number 5) 1. Keep all
2. Keep 1 & 2 - Lose 3 & 4
3. Keep 3 - Lose 1,2 & 4 4. Any other combo you can suggest? Any advice welcomed Thanks nutnut0 -
How to track seo campaign success fully?
Hi All, What are the best ways to track a seo campaign successfully, other or including Google Analytic?
Competitive Research | | ITRIX0 -
How accurate is the Keyword Difficulty Tool for international markets (specifically Australia)?
The difficulty percentage on several keywords is identical for Google.com and Google.com.au and I am wondering why?
Competitive Research | | davidangotti0 -
Backlinks: Majestic SEO vs. OSE
My apologies if this noob question has already been answered somewhere, but what's the difference between the backlinks reported by Majestic SEO vs. the links reported by OSE. Just curious why the former might report 2,360 external backlinks to a page and the latter might report 949 total links to the same page. Just curious. Thanks!
Competitive Research | | SmartDraw0 -
SEO Struggles
Hey everyone, I am a web programmer and have been fooling around with SEO for about a year now and just started to get pretty serious about it so I signed up for SEOmoz. We just launched our new site about 4 months ago (http://www.cincinnatiwebtec.com) and Google just started ranking us about a month ago. I believe we have done everything right with H1 tags, H2 tags, Title tags, alt tags, inbound links, url structure, etc. but yet we still can't even seem to get to the 1st or 2nd page of Google for "Cincinnati Web Design". I know it's going to be a competitive keyword because the people fighting for it are the SEO experts, but if you were to compare a person on page 2 or 3 to us, some of them have nothing to do with Cincinnati web design and I highly doubt they even bother with SEO, but yet they are ranked higher than us. i.e. http://www.hollandadvertising.com/ - the only place I see Cincinnati is the address at the bottom and they have only 30 inbound links according to yahoo. On top of that, they are an advertising firm, not a web design firm! I was wondering if you guys would take a look at our site above and offer some suggestions. Do you think we are spreading the keywords too thin? I mean I just can't think of why a company like the Holland Advertising example above would rank higher than us. We clearly have a more SEO optimized site, more inbound links, more quality links, 0 errors, 0 warnings, etc. I am just at a loss. Hope you guys can help. Thanks guys, Chris
Competitive Research | | Cincinnati_WebTec0 -
How do you perform competitive research for SEO?
What metrics tell you the most when you're looking at your competitors across the search landscape? PageRank/MozRank Inbound links Keyword rankings Alexa/QuantCast/etc. Pages indexed Something else entirely? What numbers speak volumes to you when you want to get an idea of how you benchmark against your competitors? And how do you communicate these results?
Competitive Research | | jcolman2