SEO for multi-regional and multilingual websites
Managing and optimizing multi-regional and
multilingual websites for search engines is easy if the Google search engine
guidelines are followed diligently.
Here are the points to consider while optimizing a website.
How to let Google know the location targeting of any website?
- Country-level domain registration
- Google search console (Location targeting can be set to domains, sub-domains, and folder level pages)
- Backlinks from websites in the targeted location
- Update physical address of the targeted location
Domain Registration
Registering a country-level domain is the best way to let Google know the location of your
target audience. A domain extension is a strong signal considered by Google to
know the location targeting. The flip side is maintaining so many websites for all
countries is not easy.
Having a single domain does not give the flexibility to let Google know the
location targeting (several countries) of the website through Google search
console or domain extension. Gaining backlinks from all locations or having
physical locations in all countries is not easy.
The next alternative is to have a single domain with a separate folder or subdomain for each country and have a subfolder for each language in each
country. This way the targeted location can be set for each location in the Google
search console.
For example,
https://www.example.com/us/en/
https://www.example.com/us/fr/
When you follow this strategy there can be some duplicate pages or several versions of the
same language across several countries. In order to avoid duplicate content
issues, consider implementing link rel=canonical element and href tags to let
Google know the alternate pages.
Server Location
Server location is not a definitive signal for search engines to understand
the targeted location of the website. Google will not give priority to any
website in search results based on the hosting server location. However, maintaining a single website and hosting server for all countries requires
expensive infrastructure.
Language:
Should I use scripts to translate the website language based on the user's
location or have separate pages for each language?
The best practice is to have separate pages or folders for each language for
search engines to crawl all language pages and for websites to be able to
rank for search queries in all languages.
Hope this blog post helped you! Contact me if you need any help in optimizing
multi-location and multilingual websites.