International SEO: How to avoid common translation and localization pitfalls

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by Anna Munhin Feb 3, 2023 News
International SEO: How to avoid common translation and localization pitfalls

My career used to involve a lot of foreign language translation.

I started working on websites for international businesses after leaving that path. Some have only been in the U.S. and Canada, while others have been around the world.

I have been able to see common areas of concern to avoid in internationalseo and fall into two major categories.

  • Translation.
  • Localization.

One of my most embarrassing career moments was when I confused the phrase "to your health" with "train station" during a toast at an international group.

The other language said the same things for the two utterances. It broke the ice between the two groups and made the trip successful.

This type of translation miscommunication doesn't help a business succeed internationally. A site's chance of ranking well and killing conversions can be hurt by errors in language.

There are people who are not native-equivalent in the target language who make some errors. I know my limitations and wouldn't publish translated text for a website in either language.

It is one thing to make your intentions known if you order in a restaurant, talk about a hockey game, or ask where the restrooms are. It is another copy for a product you are trying to sell.

Recommendation: Hire native or near-native translators to translate your copy

The cost is one of the reasons why I don't recommend hiring people to translate. Part of the price of doing business that needs to be factored in is the cost of doing business around the world.

Machine translation can be used to get around the cost. Adding a simple Javascript to the website is one way to implement this.

Machine translation isn't good enough to translate website copy. There is a recommendation against using machine translated copy without human review.

Machine translations can be affected by a lot of different things. It is possible to make your head swim with the many dialects in Spanish.

It isn't true that someone in one Spanish-speaking country will understand what someone in another Spanish-speaking country writes. If there are misunderstandings, it might be difficult to build trust.

The translated content may be invisible to the search engines if the translation piece is implemented in a way that is not transparent.

It could cause the website to lose a lot of search traffic if it had its content organized in a way that made it easier to find.

Recommendation: Even if you use machine translation, have a native or near-native speaker review the copy

It is important to consider a person's location in addition to their linguistic skills.

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Misguided localization

Traffic "leaking" from one country to another is a challenge. This is an example of what I have seen in real life.

  • An English-speaking person in Canada searches for something.
  • The site intended for people in the U.S. outranks the site set up for people in Canada.
  • The person ends up on the U.S. website, where they likely will not have the best experience.
  • They bounce and look for a better alternative.

Measurement, currency, and more are included in the definition of Localization.

Almost all of the clicks on searches done in Canada ended up on a website intended for U.S. audiences. The bounce rates were very high. This was not good for our friends in Canada.

What is the reason this happens? The U.S. version of the website was the first to launch. If the site in Canada is a duplicate, the first site published will often win out in the search results.

Website owners used to be able to specify which country was appropriate for a website in the search console. The feature was no longer useful in August.

The use of country-level.dots is good, but not enough for search engines. There was an excellent.CA available in Canadian English and Canadian French that did not get as many clicks as the website intended for the US did.

Recommendation: Implement hreflang for your multi-lingual and multi-regional digital ecosystem

Hreflang is a set of meta tags that tells which language and region a website is intended for.

It can be used to help search engines send people to the most appropriate version of your website. This is a recommendation from the search engine to help them understand how you want things to work.

Meta tags can be used if your site is small or small in number.

It can be easier to manage the extra lines of code if you use an hreflang XML sitemap.

Search engines can't always determine what language you want. It's up to you to let them know, and hreflang tags and sitemaps are the best ways to do that.

The guest author's opinions are not necessarily those of the search engine. There are staff authors here.