Multilingual websites in e-commerce: international SEO

The first phase of planning your multilingual web presence is to translate the content. In addition to web content, this also includes translating the entire range of navigation and control elements in a way that is easily understandable to an international audience. Depending on the extent of the changes to be made and your company’s available resources, it usually makes sense to hire additional staff for this purpose. In addition to translating the online content, you should consider extending other areas of your team, such as customer support. Other points to consider early on include developing language-specific marketing campaigns, link building, and establishing appropriate technical structures (i.e., webhosting, domain names, SSL certification, etc.). It’s also important to ensure that you can easily add multilingual content with your chosen CMS.

Once you have these areas covered, you can get to grips with the all-important task of international SEO. This involves the translation and adaptation of the keywords and URLs as well as technical elements such as the development of the appropriate page structure or the correct linking and forwarding.

In Western Europe and the United States, Google is the research tool of choice for various optimization processes. However, if your internalization processes involve extending your online project to Eastern European and Asian markets, you need to consider performing SEO measures for other search engines. For example, In Russia, the most popular search engine platform is Yandex. Meanwhile, internet users in China primarily use Baidu and Japanese users tend to prefer Yahoo. The importance of Amazon’s search engine also increases for SEO in e-commerce.

A multilingual website only works if you have a corresponding, scalable staff structure and a strategy for the handling different languages or countries. There should be no cutting corners here, as this will eventually show progress down and could ultimately cost you your reputation. When internationalizing your web project, it’s crucial to execute the first steps thoroughly and seamlessly; the big plus here is your business could stand to gain a prestigious status in doing so. On the other hand, as mentioned above, if the implementation of your project is weak, it is likely to have a negative effect on both potential and existing customer's confidence. Read on for a summary of what to look out for when implementing SEO for multilingual websites and the most common mistakes made by companies.

The first step of international SEO is to find a fitting domain for each international project. It’s necessary to ask yourself here whether it’s appropriate to use a uniform domain across all languages, which domain ending best suits your web project, and how the URL should be structured. The following table shows four possible options with their unique advantages and disadvantages:

The first three solutions are particularly are relevant for multilingual websites. While URL parameters are technically an option, they are unsuitable for the internationalization of websites. Google explicitly opposes this option as these pages can’t ensure a clean indexing. The most reliable options are therefore the ccTLD variant, the subdomain, or the subdirectory, with each solution having its own strengths and weaknesses.

For example, regional domains are easily recognizable and understandable for both visitors and search engine tools. In addition, with a vast range of ccTLDs, you are not tied to a specific server location. This means you can optimize the availability and loading time of your different language versions by selecting the appropriate infrastructure. However, this domain model is also associated with high costs and comparatively time-consuming administration. It’s also important to bear in mind that each of these websites will have no history or visibility to begin with, making the initial multilingual SEO measures very cumbersome.

Therefore, a generic domain is recommended for getting started with international SEO. The variant with subdirectories has the advantage that all the subpages benefit from the link strength and ranking of the homepage. The downside is that you are bound to a single server location that may have far more trouble with the subdivision of pages. With the combination of a generic top-level domain and subdomain, you have more flexibility, although you will again suffer the problem that newly generated pages will be initially left without indexing.

The server locations of international web projects used to be official factors in search engine ranking. Even though it’s now no longer vital for all language variants to be stored on a local server, in the age of mobile devices, delivering data quickly is more important than ever. It’s especially important for owners of online shops to minimize loading times and prioritize establishing a good server infrastructure in your international SEO measures, in addition to optimizing code. In recent years, content delivery networks have developed into increasingly important tools that have gained popularity thanks to their high-level performance and safety.

You should think carefully before choosing your domain structure. However, at its core, search engine optimization relies on a solid and refined keyword strategy, which is also essential for multilingual projects. These relevant key terms alert search engine crawlers of your pages and thus improve your ranking. When implementing a multilingual web presence, it’s easy to slip up when it comes to keywords. One common mistake is using the same keyword set as a basis for every language variant.

A word-for-word translation of keywords might prove more valuable and user-friendly than automatically translated content but it also reduces the effectiveness of your international SEO measure for two reasons. For one, it fails to take into account region-specific search engines such as Baidu and, furthermore, it would be a mistake to assume that keywords that are translated literally would be relevant in the target language. Even in regions that use the same language, keywords can differ (e.g., in the UK and USA). This can then pose the risk of high-quality content not being found by search engine users.

Search engines pursue the goal of displaying the most relevant webpages for each user. For users from the United States, for example, pages are prioritized that contain local content and can be assigned to the American market. To do this, crawlers use different country-specific signals, including:

• language style
• distinctive grammatical characteristics
• currencies
• units of measurement

The more you take these elements into account for various languages, the easier it is for search engines to recognize the relevance for the respective market. Google also analyzes contact numbers and addresses, for example, using such information to better evaluate the relevance of each page to the respective audience.

For your multilingual SEO efforts, this means that the clearer the signals are that you send, the easier it is for search engines to categorize your project. However, this is not always successful, even with the best algorithms. It’s possible to use the so-called hreflang attribute in some web search applications, including Google and Yandex. With this, a page refers to another that provides the same content for another language or country. This allows users to be redirected to the appropriate language automatically, giving you three options for integrating the language attribute:

hreflang as a link element in the HTML header: you can activate an automatic redirection in the <head> area using the link element. If your online shop is available in English, Spanish, and French, for example, you would simply add the following lines of code to the header for the different languages:

Even if it’s advisable to provide unique content for all languages, of course, it is not always going to be so easy. Duplicate content is especially difficult to avoid when using different markets with the same language such as the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. Fortunately, multilingual online shops do not require you to hide such pages of your online shop and to prevent crawling by using a robots.txt file or by using the "noindex" tag. If you do offer the same content under different URLs, you can use the canonical attribute, which, like hreflang, is embedded as a link element in the HTML header.

If you have created separate URLs for the American, Canadian, and British versions of your website and want to use the exact same content for all three shops, you can extend the HTML header with the following code: