Welcome to the first episode of Search Engine Nerds! We decided to narrow our focus and speak to some of the smartest minds in SEO, PPC, and search trends to give you even more tools and insights to dominate in today’s competitive market.
In this pilot episode of Nerds of search engines, SEJ Executive Editor Kelsey Jones joins Zeph Snapp, founder of Altura Interactive, a digital marketing agency that provides Spanish-language SEO and website development for businesses around the world, to discuss the best practices to create Spanish versions of websites. Zeph and Kelsey discuss what you should do before you start, whether translating content is better than creating new content in a different language, and what to keep in mind when it comes to international SEO.
I highly recommend listening to everything. the podcast where Zeph shares stories of how things can go wrong in international SEO and how things can go right and greatly increase your organic traffic.
Does a company have to be serving certain countries or Have clients in specific countries before even considering a Spanish version of your site?
Zeph: There are usually two reasons why people approach Spanish speakers and create Spanish versions of their websites. They want to reach a national market that speaks another language as their primary language, or they want to expand into international markets.
You want to make sure that you are prepared, that you feel good about where you are on the English side or on your native language before expanding to the next, unless your product is something very specific that will only be for Spanish speakers.
The most important thing is to do your initial research first. You want to make sure there is an audience for your product and service before you jump in. That means conducting extensive keyword research. It’s something you want someone specialized to do for you because even if you know some of the keywords, you can have a general idea, but you’ll have a hard time understanding the long tail and places besides Google where they might be looking for your types of products and services. .
Kelsey: That makes sense. If you’re still having issues with your native language version of your site, then maybe I’ll fix them before embarking on a Spanish version.
Zeph: You definitely want to have all your ducks in a row and do a lot of planning before you get to that stage. The planning part is also very important. You want to have a style guide, basically to understand the tone and the market you’re targeting, the specific people you’re trying to reach.
When you get a Spanish version of your site, do you do that? Do you need to have completely new content written in Spanish or is it just a translator coming in and adapting what you already have?
Zeph: First thing is you want to be working with a search and digital marketing to help you set it up. There are some things that are going to be appropriate only for a direct translation. If you’re looking at product pages and pricing pages and things like that, it’s going to be a little easier to do a direct translation. If you’re looking at blog posts, videos, even your entire service pages and the like, you want to use a process called transcreation.
Translation is a straightforward thing, right? Most translators are paid by the word. They want to do this as quickly as possible, so they will give you a literal translation of what you have in English. The problem with that is that it usually doesn’t convey the mood and brand you have, and can oftentimes be inaccurate. People are going to use the wrong word because they’re just doing a literal translation.
When you transcreate, you take the spirit of the thing and you take the understanding of that, and you create something based on that that’s new. You don’t lose what you have in English or your native language. It maintains that as it enters new markets and new countries. The best way to improve your conversion rate is to have content that speaks directly to these people who speak this other language.
Kelsey: I’ve seen bad examples out there. when a company tries to go to another country and they don’t put that work into it ahead of time, then their message gets mixed up. I think a bad translation can kill a website because it makes it seem like they don’t care enough or know enough about their customer.
Zeph: Exactly. In those situations, you’re better off not doing it if it’s going to be a poor build.If you do a bad translation, they’ll look at it and say, “These guys don’t have a clue.”
What do you do when the client’s industry is really technical and you need specialized services? knowledge to make sure the wording is correct?
Zeph: First thing is, you have to do a lot of research. That’s why we created the style guide beforehand. Part of the style guide is when we use terminology. I would use this term but not this term, and I would create those kinds of lists where we can give feedback to the customer and say, “Okay, these are the terms that we found. What works best for you?” Typically, that give and take results in the creation of a style guide that is accurate.
The most important thing is to maintain your brand and maintain the type of voice you want people to get out of your content, and if you don’t have that foundation of a style guide and understanding, it’s going to be very difficult to achieve.
Do SEO best practices change for Spanish-language websites or English versions? other languages?
Zeph: One of the great things about working in other languages is that you have opportunities that don’t exist in English.For example, we’ve seen a significant uptake in recent months seeing the answer boxes on the SERPs. That’s something that didn’t exist before. It’s still pretty limited in Spanish as well. What ends up happening is that since the SERP is a bit further behind, if you’re doing things that are more data, such as structured data, and preparing for answer boxes, you are more likely to e succeed.
As for the best practices themselves, they don’t change much. But you can get away with much more in other languages than in English. The other question that people ask a lot is: “Do I need a ccTLD? Do I need to make a separate subfolder or subdomain? Which is the best strategy?” Of course, the answer is: “It depends. That depends on your situation.” Aleyda Solis wrote a post for Moz that is basically like a decision tree to help you figure out how you should play that. With hreflang, there are other great resources. Many companies have now created hreflang creators and validators, including us. You can go in and make sure the language country marking is correct to make sure it displays correctly.
I think the situation where it’s most important to have ccTLDs is if you’re going to have locations physical domains in these specific countries.In those situations, a ccTLD is necessary, but there are situations, especially when you are testing a concept and testing something or if you have a virtual product, where you can get by with a subfolder or subfolder domain. That way you don’t have to worry about all the ccTLDs and control them separately.That said, if you are a big enough company and can afford it or if it’s a priority for you, you should definitely go out and buy as many ccTLDs of your own as you can so that no one else takes them. from you.
Is there a Google penalty if you don’t have hreflang on your site?
Zeph: The reason hreflang came up is basically a way for people to avoid a duplicate content penalty. Let’s say you’re Domino’s. You provide service to all Latin American countries. Well, your homepages and subpages will all look the same, right? They’re all going to have very, very similar texts. How will Google know that it is not duplicate content? That in fact, this content is for specific countries? That’s why they came up with a marked hreflang. It’s to define for them which page will be published in which case.
So if you created subpages that were in English for every country in the world and you didn’t put a hreflang for it, you’ll probably get penalized for duplicate content because you will have the same page 167 times or so. That’s the kind of penalty you might see because you didn’t use the specific markup. What hreflang is supposed to do is display the correct page with the correct information for that specific instance.
The other interesting part is that there are instances where you don’t need it. If your content is significantly different in another language and you have it in a separate ccTLD or even a subdomain, we’ve seen cases where people rank perfectly for your terms without having hreflang checked. It’s always good to cover your bases, but if your content is different enough, it’s not entirely necessary.
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Think you have what it takes to be a search engine nerd? If so, message Kelsey Jones on Twitter or email her at kelsey [at] searchenginejournal.com.
Image credits
Featured Image: Paulo BobitaIn- Afterimage #1: Rawpixel/DepositPhotosAfterimage #2: Rawpixel/DepositPhotos
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