This post was originally published on the STAT blog.
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If you’re familiar with hreflang, you’ll know just how essential this teensy bit of code is to a successful international campaign. You’ll also know that it comes with a boatload of moving parts — multiple pages, sections, and subdomains per country.
That’s a lot of data to track. And if you aren’t hyper-organized, it’s easy to miss out on some big time insights.
Lucky for you, there’s a handy way to track your hreflang campaigns: all you need are a few dynamic tags in STAT. And even luckier for you, Dan Nutter[2], Technical SEO Specialist at twentysix[3], agreed to share his wisdom on this very subject.
Below, you’ll learn how to set up your own dynamic tags in STAT, monitor all your pages, and even visualize all that data to impress your team, boss, and clients.
The origins of hreflang
The hreflang attribute, for those unfamiliar, tells Google which language you are using on a specific page. Introduced back in 2011[4], it essentially allows us to speak to our target audience in different countries in their languages.
Developing it, though, has been described by Google’s John Mueller[5] as one of the most difficult sides to SEO:
While certainly complex, hreflang has been immensely helpful for companies looking to increase their site (or, in our case, our client’s sites) visibility and grow their audience. This is because: when searchers see the right language of content, it helps decrease bounce rate and increase conversions.
Since hreflang requires such a significant amount of time and effort from both SEO and development teams, clients (rightly) want to see