Managing languages correctly is the cornerstone of great international SEO. While there are many elements specific to individual languages and countries, today I want to talk about some basic concepts:
For example:
More interesting data:
Pretty familiar information but unfortunately things get even more complicated than that.
Welcome to the XXI century where we move from one side of the globe to the other in half a day and many languages are lingua franca, breaking through borders and cultures.
English is the most obvious example, but there are many others like Swahili, or Kiswahili, spoken by 40 million people in 12 countries yet only being official in 4 of them. You even can search Google in Kiswahili!
Going a bit further, there are specific markets where trying to match countries and languages make no sense at all, for example hospitality. Working in your international SEO for hotels? Pay attention.
Letâs review some of those situations.
Letâs say this is a medium-size hotel chain with hotels in several European countries. They offer 6 languages for users to navigate the site. A look to Google Analytics data breaking revenue by country of visit and browser language shows some interesting outliers.
You see? Not always what we would assume.
Wait a minute, are we taking for granted that someone using a browser in a certain language is going to navigate the site in that same language? (if available of course.)
Not always. If we take into consideration a third variable, languages available on the site visited, it all gets a bit messier. For example:
In the same hotel chain site scenario only 0.5% of the visits coming from US are using a browser in Spanish to navigate the site. Does it mean only 0.5% are Hispanics? Not at all.
If we relate visits from US navigating inside the /es/ section of the site weâll find that in total they represent 6.3%. 5.8% are using a browser in English although the prefer Spanish!
Another assumption debunked.
Probably most of those Hispanics who feel more conformable visiting the Spanish version of the site have installed a browser with English as a default language, and they donât take the time to change it because: a) it can be a technical challenge; b) they also speak English so they donât really care about; c) they are navigating at work hours where there is a higher chance to have browser installed in English.
Somehow we expect to have a similar distribution for the visitors who preferred to navigate the site in Spanish but what is happening is not exactly that what shows. There are more complex reasons to identify geolocation of your audience based on language assumptions.
Simple, it does not fit at all. At least for hospitality sites.
If you want to know how to handle multilingual sites for humans and search engines seamlessly from a technical standpoint read what I wrote a long time ago, including a diagram of the logic involved.
In the case of e-commerce sites, geolocation is an interesting way to establish default settings like currency or legal terms associated to a country. Also language could be inferred from geographic location but even in that case I would rely more on browser language, higher chance to guess visitorâs preferred one.
Whether you should offer the typical splash page for users to select a country and language is a complete different story, which I won’t get in to.
In any case, always review your analytics data, comparing country of visitsâ origin to their browserâs language and the language they decide to navigate by.
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