Once you've decided the countries and languages you're going to target, structuring your website is a very important aspect of international SEO. And in this video we'll look at some of the technical things that you can do to your websites and pages to help search engines find and understand the different internationalized components of you web properties. For a multilingual site, determining where to place your translated content is an important step, and one that's not easily undone once you've made your decision. Some websites structure their multilingual websites by placing different translations on different subdomains.
For example, you might place your Spanish version of the site on es.yourdomain.com, using the two-character language code for Spanish. Other websites will simply keep everything on their main www site, but place the different content in different subfolders. This might look like www.yourdomain.com/es. Both methods are effective in establishing a different silo of content dedicated to a certain language. And they both have risks and advantages. For example, using different subdomains allows you complete freedom in your implementation, since it can technically be considered a completely different website.
This means that if for a different language you also have a totally different site layout,navigation scheme, and even a different set of content, you can easily accommodate that, by essentially running the second website. From an SEO perspective however, remember that you've likely spent a lot of time and energy building up the overall value of your main www domain and building a new site on a new subdomain, means losing a lot of that. If you have a very strong www domain from a search perspective, you may wanna consider leveraging all that SEO work by keeping everything on the www site.
When you split out your content into subdomains, your link value is distributed to all your sites, which could actually adversely impact your site visibility. Using subfolders to house your multiligual content reduces this risk and brings the full strength of your domain to bear. But it also brings with it some disadvantages. For example, if the content varies from a direct translation of your site page by page from one language to another, you may run into challenges. Implementing different site frameworks or variations from content structures, for example, can be very difficult to accomplish on content management systems.
And it's also important to note that many content management platforms have already provided a way to handle additional languages, which may force you into the decision of simply accepting it, or switching to or building something else. If you're targeting different countries, while you can certainly use a subdomain or subfolder method, many sites prefer to use separate country specific, or Country Code Top-Level Domains, known as ccTLDs. A big benefit of having a Country Code Top-Level Domain name for your multi-regional content, is that you'll be providing one of the strongest signals to both search engines and users about the site's country of origin.
And if you choose to host each site locally, you can add even more strength to that signal.This also allows additional geo targeting opportunities, not only in the ability to fully customizethe experience for the local visitor, but also in that when you use a ccTLD URL structure,search engines like Google find it very easy to determine which country your website is targeting, and which country versions of its search engine should show you results. So, while this option can put out the strongest signal to search engines with respect to regions, and it also offers the maximum flexibility to reflect the differences in your business from one country to the next, there are also some disadvantages.
This approach requires significant resources and investment, because now you're actually creating and maintaining completely different websites. And from an SEO perspective, like with subdomains, you'll once again be losing that search value that you've built up for your main site, and you have to build that up again with all these local sites. And you might come up against some very tactical issues too. For example, you might find that without a physical presence in a country, you can be prevented from registering your target country domain name all together. Every country has its own rules and regulations, and you'll be well served to research this ahead of time.
Now, the most likely case for you, is that you're not going to have the luxury of focusing only on new countries or only on new languages. The reality is that you're likely gonna have to handle many country and language combinations, and this can add a new layer of complexity.If business conditions don't vary too much from country to country, and content changes are less drastic, you might do well to host your multi-regional sites using the subfolder or subdomain structure to reflect the combination of region and language. Here, you can see that we're using two subfolders.
The first for the country, and the second for the language. And notice these are also using standard two-character country codes. You may also find that combining ccTLDs, or subdomains along with subfolders, is a good way to keep things organized. Like in these examples. Here both default the www subdomain to the United states, but one set is using the .ca domain extension to determine the country, where the other uses the ca. subdomain.In both situations, additional languages are then determined by the subfolder.
In both the case of a ccTLD and a subdomain, these can allow the server to be located in the local country, which can also help strengthen that local signal to search engines. Of course, if language is more important to you than region, or if the sheer volume of one compared to the other makes things easier, you can always flip this around. Though less common, in this case language is determined by the subdomain, and country becomes a subfolder. It's also important to note that geo targeting can be set up in Google Webmaster Tools for both subfolders, top level domains, and subdomains.
One of the risks in using one of these solutions, is that while the search engines can normally detect country signals being sent, users may not always recognize them. For instance, a person landing on your es.yourdomain.com subdomain, or www.yourdomain.com/es subfolder, may not recognize that they're on your Spain country site, which would lead to a bit of confusion for them if your content is really optimized and is entirely in Spanish. Of course, simple user interface elements and best practices like auto detection and the ability to choose both country and language from drop-downs, that are typically located on the top-right of your pages, need to be considered as you're building out these designs.
Ultimately, the best structure is the one that addresses your business needs, and that you can both afford and support. So, take your time in this important decision. Make sure it can scale to your future plans, and once you've made that decision be consistent in executing on that strategy. And with search engines easily detecting your language and country targets, they'll provide the most relevant and appropriate pages of your site to just the right searchers.
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