SEO and multilingualism: how do you get it right?
One of the most interesting issues surrounding SEO concerns multilingualism. Correct implementation depends entirely on what you […]
One of the most interesting issues surrounding SEO concerns multilingualism. The correct implementation depends entirely on your objective. In any case, it always guarantees some lively discussions with web developers due to the technical set-up.
Select language (and region)
Search engines are able to determine the language in which a website is written based on the text on the site. With SEO, you shouldn’t leave this to chance; you need to specify the language in the HTML, and you can do this straight away by including a ‘lang’ attribute in the opening tag <html lang="nl">. This code tells search engines that the content of the web page in question is in Dutch. It does not necessarily matter which country the visitor is in.
To specify a particular country, you can include the region in the ‘lang’ attribute, for example: <html lang="nl-NL"> or <html lang="nl-BE">. With ‘nl-NL’, you target Dutch speakers in the Netherlands, and with ‘nl-BE’, you target Dutch speakers in Belgium.
Do you use subdomains, subfolders or different domain extensions?
If you want to be easily found in a particular country, you should use the local domain name. To ensure you’re easily found in the Netherlands, you should ideally register a ‘.nl’ domain name. If you also want to be easily found in Belgium, it’s best to use an international domain extension (such as .com) and choose either a subdomain (for example be.domain.com) or a subfolder (domain.com/be).
Applying hreflang tags
If your online shop is in English and your customers are based in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Canada, we recommend creating several subfolders under a single international domain extension. As the product information is largely the same, you will want to duplicate content prevent this by publishing exactly the same content in three language versions. This is where hreflang tags come into play. Here’s an example:
<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/uk/product-01/" hreflang="en-UK" /><link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/za/product-01/" hreflang="en-ZA" /><link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/ca/product-01/" hreflang="en-CA" /><link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/product-01/" hreflang="en" /><link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/product-01/" hreflang="x-default" />
Google determines which language version of the website is most appropriate largely on the basis of the user’s browser language settings. A visitor from South Africa will immediately see the search result in Google with the URL https://example.com/za/. Google’s aim is to direct visitors to the most relevant information. Ensure that the hreflang tags on all web pages in every language continue to link to one another.
If the user’s language is not listed among the hreflang tags, Google displays the URL under ‘x-default’. This acts as a fallback, so to speak. A visitor from the United States or Australia will be directed to https://example.com/product-01/ via Google using the hreflang tags shown above.
As it’s easy to make a mistake, check all changes using a Hreflang validator.
Fancy a chat about multilingualism?
Are you a web developer struggling to find the right way to implement multilingual functionality? Feel free to get in touch with SEO Ninja. We’ve been doing this for years.