If you’re company or brand is expanding internationally or serving areas where more than one language is predominant, then these tips will help you get started or make your website better serve your audiences. I will focus on Hispanic audiences for this article but know that these tips can be applied to any language.
Going Beyond Translation
Beyond translating the original website text, consider where your consumers are in the marketing funnel. Do they know you as well as your regular customers? Is your brand equity in this new market established? Are your competitors similar or very different? Is your value proposition perceived the same? Is the conversion experience the same (same documents, shipping options, etc.)? Take all of these factors into account as you translate. If you’re in a new market, your translation should do a heavier lift on building that brand value proposition.
Multilingual SEO Technicalities
HREFLANG Tag
This tag is used to tell search engines the language of your website. Users searching in that language will be served the correct version of your website (if available). Google will also serve the appropriate language version if the IP address of the searcher corresponds to a country where the language is spoken. An example of a website made for a Mexican audience would be hreflang=”es-mx”. This code needs to be embedded in the head portion of your HTML code. You can tell Google which language is your website default by using the x-default language code with your HREFLANG tag. Visit the additional resources below for more information.
Language & Country Codes
To specify the website language, you must use language and an optional country code with the HREFLANG tag. This tag works in two ways. First, you can specify the language with a language code. For a full list of language codes, visit the ISO 639-1 standard. Second, if you are making language localizations by country, let’s say Mexican Spanish (es-mx) and Argentina Spanish (es-ar), then you can combine the language and country code. Review the country codes at the ISO 3166-1 standard.
URL Structure
Your website should keep different languages in separate URL structures. I will use Spanish for this example, often abbreviated as “es” for español. It is recommended to have a different domain, brand.es / marca.com, subdomains es.brand.com, or a subdirectory sample.com/es. Think of it as a separate bucket for each language. Mixing them will hurt your potential SEO. An example of Mexican Spanish versus Argentine Spanish could be brand.com/mx and brand.com/ar.
ALT Tags
Don’t forget to translate your descriptive ALT tags to your images and content. Having two languages on the same site can cause SEO issues.
Website Rankings Vary by Language
Your websites will rank very differently depending on the language. Since English is the primary language of the Internet, then your English website will have more to compete against. Other languages will probably have less to compete with, so they might rank higher and faster.
Additional Resources
Review the following resources as SEO best practices evolve and may have changed since this article was authored.
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