International brands have their work cut out for them. Building a consistent brand experience across multiple continents and to audiences that speak different languages is no easy task, and the process of translating individual pages from one language to another is time consuming and resource intensive.
Unfortunately, much of this work can go to waste if the right steps aren’t taken to help search engines understand how your site has been internationalized.
To help you prevent this, we’ve collected a list of “Do’s and Don’ts” to help guide your internationalization efforts and ensure that your pages get properly indexed by search engines.
Do conduct language specific keyword research
The direct translation of a keyword will not necessarily be what users are searching for in that language. Rather than simply taking the translation at face value, you will have more success if you take a look at your options in the Google Keyword Planner[1] to see if there are other phrasings or synonyms that are a better fit.
Remember to update your location and language settings within the planner, listed just above the “keyword ideas” field:
Don’t index automatic translation
Automatic translation can be better than nothing as far as user experience goes in some circumstances, but users should be warned that the translation may not be reliable, and pages that have been automatically translated should be blocked from search engines in robots.txt. Automatic translations will typically look like spam to algorithms like Panda and could hurt the overall authority of your site.
Do use different URLs for different languages
In order to ensure that Google indexes alternate language versions of each page, you need to ensure that these pages are located