Are you managing a website in multiple languages or targeting multiple countries? If so, you\’ll want to sidestep these common translation and localization pitfalls to enhance your international SEO strategy.
Translation Missteps
- Quality Translations:
- Avoid using translators who aren’t native or near-native speakers. Poor translations can harm SEO and conversion rates.
- Recommendation: Hire native or near-native translators to ensure culturally relevant content. Machine translation should be reviewed by native speakers for accuracy.
- Avoiding Machine Translation Over-reliance:
- While machine translation has improved, it often misses dialectical nuances.
- Recommendation: Use machine translation as a starting point, but always have a native or near-native speaker review and refine the text.
Localization Challenges
- Country-Specific Experiences:
- Ensure traffic lands on the correct regional site. For example, Canadian users may end up on the U.S. site due to higher rankings.
- Recommendation: Implement hreflang attributes to specify language and country for each page.
- Structuring Your Digital Ecosystem:
- Country-level TLDs or subdomains alone aren’t enough. Clearly signal to search engines which country or region each page targets.
- Recommendation: Use hreflang meta tags or XML sitemaps for managing multi-lingual and multi-regional sites.
- Avoid Duplicate Content Issues:
- Duplicate content confuses search engines and affects rankings.
- Recommendation: Localize all elements, including metadata and alt text. Use country-specific currency and measurements.
FAQs for International SEO
- Do I need to optimize each site separately?
- Not necessarily. Set SEO rules at the template level if your sites use a common template. Tailor content optimization and link building to each language and location.
- Should I use a domain for each country?
- It depends on your budget and strategy. You can use ccTLDs for each country or a gTLD with subfolders for different languages and regions.
- Subdomains or subfolders?
- Both can work, but consistency is key. Subfolders are often preferred for easier analytics and hreflang mapping.
- How do I combine different language sites into one?
- Treat it as a global site migration project. Understand each site’s content before mapping them to a unified URL structure.
- How do I set up a country/language switcher?
- Use a detection script based on the user’s location to provide a seamless experience.
