DesigningIT & Acclaro Webinar Presentation. The webinar is geared towards digital marketing professionals, web admins and developers who are interested in creating or maintaining a successful, revenue-generation multilingual website.
The full webinar is available here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x-hFKS9TuU
8. Reasons to Build a Multilingual or Multi-
regional Website:
Explosion of Internet users worldwide
Growth of e-commerce spending
Various business and strategic reasons
offset seasonality
cheaper to conduct business elsewhere
competition is forcing hand
customers located elsewhere
9. internet world stats
Explosion of Internet Users
2000 - 2017
360 million
INTERNET USERS
2000
5.9%
OF WORLD’S POPULATION
3.88 billion
INTERNET USERS
2017
51.7%
OF WORLD’S POPULATION
976.4% growth 2000 to 2017
10. GLOBAL B2C
e-commerce sales
$2.6 trillion
in 2016
Projected to hit $3.8 trillion in 2020
GLOBAL B2B
e-commerce sales
$7.3 trillion
in 2016
Projected to hit $12 trillion in 2020
For the first time in 2014, consumers in Asia-Pacific spend more
on e-commerce than North America.
14. Domain
How to Structure your International Site
ccTLD
Country Code Top Level Domain
• amazon.de
• amazon.es
• boc.cn
gTLD
Generic Top Level Domain
• amazon.com
• apple.com
• sony.net
gccTLD
generic Country Code Top Level
Domain
• site.io [British Indian Ocean]
• site.co [Colombia]
Vanity ccTLD treated as gTLD
ccSLD
Second-Level Domains (ccSLDs)
• prudential.co.uk
• honda.co.jp
Different Domain
use an entirely different domain
name for your localized website.
-> one of the first steps to expanding internationally is to decide if you expand by language or country
15. c c T L D
S u b f o l d e r
S u b d o m a i n
Country Targeting
• de-de.facebook.com
• it-it.facebook.com
• apple.com/chde
• paypal.com/de
• gazprom.de
• gazprom.ru
• metroag.de/en
How to Structure your International Site
16. R
E
S
E
A
R
C
H
FORBES Global 1000
Country Targeting
Country code in
Subfolder: 22.5%
ccTLD: 9.5%
Country code in
Subdomain: 3.1%
Different URL Format:
49.5% **
** chevronaustralia.com, chevronunitedkingdom.com
3m.com.hk/3M/zh_HK/company-hk/
falabella.com.ar/falabella-ar/
34. - Linguistic reference materials as base
- Internationalization of CMS and database
- Database (UTF-8)
- Format date, currency, address, phone, etc.
- Design of International Page Templates
- using company brand assets (colors..)
- Localization of pages
- Consideration for Company name / tagline
-> Internationalization enables localization
How to Create Global Brand Consistency
PROCESS
1] Internationalize
2] Localize (translation)
3] Multilingual SEO
= Global ready Website
40. Which Structure is Best?
it depends ..
we need to consider:
- type of website (e-com, SaaS,.. )
- brand reach / company size / office locations
- target audience
- business Strategy
Best URL Structure for SEO
PROs CONs
- Clearest signal to SE
- Best way to rank locally
- Best conversion rate
- Expensive to maintain
- Separate Domain Authority for
each Site
ccTLDs - amazon.de .. amazon.it
- Easier to maintain
- Shared DA
- Geotarget with Google
- Weaker signal to SE
- Users prefer ccTLS, higher
conversion rate.
Subdirectories - skype.com/en .. skype.com/de
- More control than sub
- Easier to maintain
- Geotarget with Google
- Weaker signal to SE
- Diluted DA
Subdomains - de-de.facebook.comtypically more reasons to go with subdirectory
over a subdomain.
41. ▪ Perform Keyword Research in your local language (don’t translate keywords)
▪ Get content professionally translated (LSP)
▪ Build appropriate, local backlinks to your language or region URLs
▪ Make sure you don’t have duplicate content
▪ Avoid mixing ccTLD with gTLD (this complicates SEO efforts)
▪ According to google, server location is not a factor anymore (CDNs)
▪ Follow all the regular SEO best practices
▪ For usability make sure to
▪ Translate your URLs
- skype.com/en/about
- skype.com/de/uber-uns
▪ Give users an easy way to switch/choose country or language
▪ Target your URLs correctly with either Google Console or hreflang
SEO Considerations
42. How to Structure your International Site
Country Targeting - Google Search Console
43. hreflang
Correct hreflang configuration + international targeting in google search console best way to provide google with the right signals.
75% of multilingual websites have implementation mistakes [from test of 20,000 multilingual sites]
hreflang is a signal, not a directive. (this means, you need to still boost your localized URLs with a strong local backlink profile)
hreflang can NOT be used for country only targeting.
Region can not be used (like eu or asia)
hreflang is per individual URL/Page, not site wide.
Use x-default on homepage for country/lang selection
Cross Reference and Self Reference
Implementation
Language (in ISO 639-1 format) first + optionally the Country (in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format)
de: German content, independent of region
en-gb: English content, for GB users
de-es: German content, for users in Spain
Format
How to Structure your International Site
44. <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://href-lang.com/chord.html" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ie" href="http://ie.href-lang.com/chord.html" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="http://uk.href-lang.com/chord.html" />
<link rel="canonical" href="http://href-lang.com/chord.html" />
Code
h r e f l a n g = “ e n ”
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-gb" hreflang="en-GB" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-us" hreflang="en-US" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/" hreflang="x-default" />
Default
h r e f l a n g = “ x - d e f a u l t ”
Common Mistakes
Using underscore instead of hyphen
Mixing up position of language and country code
Using country code without language code
Using invalid country code or language code
Missing the self-reference url
Defining UK for country code of Great Britain GB
How to Structure your International Site
hreflang
45. How to Structure your International Site
Language Targeting - Google Search Console
47. Targeting Optimization
There are three main ways to get users to their appropriate locale.
1. ccTLD
2. Geolocation (IP) or Language Negotiation
Recommendation: Only suggest country or language.
Automatic redirect can have implications for Search Engine Spider.
3. User Choice
- Global gateway
- Language Switcher
- Country Picker
For Users
How to Structure your International Site
49. Targeting Optimization - Country
Flag as triggerGlobe Icon Country name in English
18% 4% 3%
Recommendation
Country Trigger
Country Selector
English Country name only Country name in current lang
36%
Flag and Country Name
15% 9%
Country names translated to
user’s native language
50. Targeting Optimization
Language code as trigger
23%
Language name in local language
24%
Flag and Language name
8%
Language Trigger
56% 20%
Language name in native language Language code
14%
Language name in english
NO!
!
Language Selector
51. Country and Language Selection Location
L a n g u a g e S e l e c t i o n
Top Right 56%
Top Left 7%
Footer 4%
Other 11%
C o u n t r y S e l e c t i o n
Top Right 50%
Top Left 7%
Footer 14%
Other 28%
How to Structure your International Site
Before we jump into our goals for this afternoon, I wanted to take care of a few housekeeping items:
Please note that all attendees are in listen only mode
To test your audio, click on audio settings in your console (click)
To ask questions throughout the session, please use the Q&A tab and ask your question and hit the send button. We’ll get to most of these toward the end of the session.
Any questions we do not get to, we will answer during one on one follow up sessions
Also - We’ve disabled chat for this webinar so please use the Q&A tab for questions
Before we jump into our goals for this afternoon, I wanted to take care of a few housekeeping items:
Please note that all attendees are in listen only mode
To test your audio, click on audio settings in your console (click)
To ask questions throughout the session, please use the Q&A tab and ask your question and hit the send button. We’ll get to most of these toward the end of the session.
Any questions we do not get to, we will answer during one on one follow up sessions
Also - We’ve disabled chat for this webinar so please use the Q&A tab for questions
Intro to Acclaro
Tictail intro
kpis
qualitative research
cost vs benefit analysis
kpis
qualitative research
cost vs benefit analysis
kpis
qualitative research
cost vs benefit analysis
kpis
qualitative research
cost vs benefit analysis
Poll question 1
Answers:
Poll question 2:
Global brand consistency
This html parameters shows search engines what the relationship is between web pages in alternate languages.
The correct language or country version will appear in the correct local version of google.