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An Introduction to Best Practices for an International Website
When we talk to clients about website translation, we are often asked what the best practices for site positioning are at the international level, i.e. how web content can be optimised for search engines in other countries.
The question that most companies ask us is whether it is necessary to have a different SEO strategy for each language on their multilingual site.
It’s a rather complex question, but the short answer is simple: yes, each translated version of a website will need to be customised to the target audience.
This is why international SEO implies a big investment in terms of both time and money.
SEO stands for «search engine optimisation», but for the sake of clarity, let’s define it as optimising a website to be found easily by the most important search engines, Google especially.
The concept of multilingual SEO refers to the measures taken to optimise a site’s visible and invisible content in two or more languages, whether a blog, an e-commerce portal, or something else.
Another important concept is that to translate with SEO in mind means not translating a language’s keywords literally into their direct equivalents in other languages.
You need to have a comprehensive knowledge of the language, culture, history, practices, habits, buying tendencies of the country where you want to sell your products or services, in order to adapt the content as best as possible without offending your public’s sensibilities.
In order to understand what the user is really looking for and provide the best search results you will also need to go beyond just the words. Often, this will mean rethinking the entire user experience. Once again, it becomes clear that what seems at first like a “simple translation” job will need a much deeper analysis.
Before deciding whether to begin international SEO for a site, blog, or e-commerce portal, you will need to take two factors into account:
- target languages
- available budget.
As far as the target is concerned, you need to adapt and translate into the language or languages spoken by current and potential clients.
If you want to export to a foreign country, you cannot assume the population of your target region speaks English. Even in countries where English is widely spoken, the overwhelming majority of users prefer to buy from sites available in their native language.
As far as budgets are concerned, it’s very difficult to develop the skills needed to define an efficient SEO strategy from one day to the next simply by relying on internal resources.
You will need to rely on the help of professionals specialised in international SEO, and this requires an investment which will be bigger the more languages you want to translate your site into.
If you are working with a smaller budget, it’s better to focus your efforts on just one market (1 country, 1 language), rather than to try to reach multiple markets with limited resources.
In addition to this, there are several elements to consider before you can properly internationalise a site and optimise it on the SEO level.
1. Finding The Right Domain
The first step is choosing where the translated version of your site will be localised. There are three options for organising and structuring content on the domain level.
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First domain level:
https://www.domain.co.ukOf all the domain types, this one will gain the most trust from users, as they will recognise it as being from their own country. For example, this configuration is used by Audi for each country they sell in (audi.it, audi.de, audi.fr, etc.). The main issue here is the high level of investment required, as it not only implies buying a domain for each country, but also drawing up a new SEO strategy for each and every one of them.
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Subdomain:
https://en.domain.comThis is essentially a web address linked to a main domain. In theory, this type of strategy allows part of the authority to be transferred from the main domain to the various subdomains. The best example of this is Wikipedia, which has a subdomain for every language.
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Subfolder:
https://www.domain.com/enThis represents a folder or site section within a main domain. The subfolder is the best choice for those on a limited budget, although the users’ point of view may be lost here, as visitors will notice they are using a site that has been translated from another language. This is the best option for local businesses whose clients, national or otherwise, are based in the same country.
2. The Importance of The hreflang Aspect
One other technical aspect that many web developers either do not know or underestimate is the significance of the hreflang aspect in a page’s HTML code.
If your multilingual content is not properly administrated, search engines may end up interpreting it as duplicated content.
To resolve this issue, you need to add a link tag to the <head> section of the page, with the attributes rel="alternate" and hreflang="xx-yy", which show search engines that the content for each country and language is one and the same.
To get a clearer sense of this, let’s take a look at an example of a home page of a website in three different languages and for three different countries: Italy, France, and the USA.
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="it-it" href="http://www.domain.com/it" /><link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://www.domain.com/en" /><link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-fr" href="http://www.domain.com/fr" />
It may seem like a minor detail, but it is crucial to making sure Google does not penalise your site.
3. Adapting Design and Ease of Use to Each Country
Baffling though it is, there are still some brands out there that forget how vitally important user-oriented design is when developing sites.
One detail that is often forgotten is the option to change language: the button should be visible and easy to understand. It should also not impose itself over, or take away from, other elements that are already present on the page.
You must also remember to have the different cultures of each country in mind when organising content. Without going into complex IT architecture issues, suffice it to say that each country has different preferences when it comes to organising texts.
One very clear example of cultural differences can be seen on the Shopify site. The Spanish version has a very simple homepage with short texts and a somewhat minimalist style.
The Japanese homepage on the other hand features more text and a rather invasive animation. The reason for this is that on a cultural level, the Japanese prefer a slightly more extravagant design: if they do not see a large volume of text, they tend to find the lack of information untrustworthy.
4. Replacing Texts
The volume of content often varies so much from one language to the next that it has an effect on page design, as phrase and word lengths can vary, at times considerably so.
And let’s not forget the fact that someone needs to translate all the content, and this person is clearly not Google Translate.
We usually entrust this task to translators, who are usually paid for it by the word: the longer the original text, the more the translation will cost. So, now it’s time to decide what content is useful and must be kept, and what is not useful and ought to be left out of the translated versions of your site.
If, for example, you have a dense blog with a lot of news about industry fairs and national events that have already happened, you might want to consider leaving them out of versions for other countries, as the timing and content will both be irrelevant.
5. Renaming Pages and Images
All pages need to be identified in your new audience’s language, right down to the URL level.
This is closely linked to the first point, the domain: if you have set up a subfolder for English, naming just one page in Italian will not be enough. For example:
www.domain.com/en/PAGENAME.htmlwww.domain.com/it/.NOMEPAGINA.html
And yes, you guessed it, you will need to do this for each page in each language. To get the best SEO results, it’s also important to word your texts consistently.
The same goes for images, which will have to be named properly to contribute to site positioning. For example:
www.domain.com/en/images/nameimage.jpegwww.domain.com/it/immagini/nomeimmagine.jpg
6. Updating The Sitemap
The sitemap.xml file, is the list of all the pages that make up your site.
This is what informs search engines about our content so that it can be indexed properly.
Once your site has been translated, you will need to include all the new pages (in each chosen language) on the site, as well as any videos, images, etc. The technical details will vary depending on the system used to create the site.
If everything has been done correctly, your site will be properly indexed by search engines.
Once you have completed each of these steps (and others which we will talk about in future), and activated your site with all the changes included, it will need monitoring to make sure everything is working perfectly.
Broadly speaking, the way Google reacts to your content will tell you whether it has been properly indexed or not. Does it find the site easily? Is the site being classified properly?
Google itself provides lots of tools for users to analyse a site’s behaviour in real time, like Google Analytics.
Conclusions
Internationalising a site and its relevant SEO are complicated and long-term activities. There is no easy way, and it’s not an exact science. Instead, there are extra elements to consider that mean more work for the webmaster. And as often happens in the digital marketing field, all you can really do is follow a pattern of trial and error:
- follow best practices and your analyses
- measure the results
- analyse the measurements and results
- start over from step 1.
If you need help adapting and translating your site, don’t hesitate to contact us.
