For sites that target multiple locations, creating tailored localized experiences will begin with planning. While simply offering translated versions of your site's content in multiple languageis certainly an acceptable start, when you're targeting multiple regions you may find that you want to go a step further and ensure that your content is optimized for the local visitor. In addition to helping provide a great user experience, another benefit of creating content for the local visitor will be stronger signals to the search engines that indicate your site's purposeand these will help attract a more qualified audience that will be interested in what you have to say.
Additionally, taking the extra step to localize your content to particular regions can help you attract powerful links and mentions from other local sites, a concept we'll look at in more detail later on in the course. But what could be considered localized content that strays from the simple direct translation of your main website? For starters, think about your site's core functionality. Look at your internal search box and search results. Have you tuned your internal search engine parameters to make sure that you're responding to queries in the right language, or promoting local content to searches done from localized pages? What about the forms on your website? Do they support and default to the right formats for the right locations? A big one here is regional addressing differences since this is such a common element in many forms.
In the United States, for example, it's common to ask for the name of a state and a zip code when purchasing a product. In Canada, however, there's provinces and postal codes. In other regions there may not even be a state or a province, and you'll need to display the right interface for the local user to understand and fill it out. Another area ripe for localization is around your contact information. If you've got local offices or locations, make sure to have the local contact details, such as addresses and phone numbers, visible and accessible.
For example, for US-based users, you might put your US offices front and center, listing other global offices below. But on your contact page that's been regionalized for Germany, the German offices will be listed first and your US addresses will drop down to that list of other global offices. You'll want to be sure to list out your locations' hours of operations, different phone numbers and email addresses, and other key components that can represent a strong regional signal for search engines. You can also take this a step further and incorporate schema.org structured data to help search engines understand clearly all the attributes of a certain location, and where that location fits within the overall organization.
Generally, schema.org structured data is a type of code or a special markup that helps search engines better understand your content. Using specific types and subtypes of the markup,you can provide search engines with explicit information about an organization, its products and services, or certain types of content and media. Even basic schema.org markup for international SEO can help search engines better understand your localized content. You could look at schema.org/Organization, for example, to explicitly define for search enginesthings like address, location, telephone, and email contact information, or even subtypes like schema.org/LocalBusiness to tell search engines about your regional office, services offered at this location, your hours, currencies you do business in, and so on.
Back to things that can be localized. If you're doing e-commerce internationally, you'll have additional opportunities to tailor the user experience and provide regional content on the pages of your site. You may have different products, different guarantees, different pricing, different currencies, different taxes, different payment methods, and there may be even differences in how you write product descriptions to cater to local messaging or even local legal restrictions. On the publishing side, if you run a site that promotes global content like a news site or perhaps a global professional organization, even the content of your home page will need to change based on the language and location of the user.
There's no need to stop here. If you are a business-to-business site, take a look at your list of clients that you highlight or the case studies that you're publishing to your site. You may choose to reorder or promote those that will resonate best with the regional audience that you're targeting. If you are a community or user-generated content site, you might choose to bubble up different content to different users based on their language and location. The point is there are many things that can be optimized for local visitors, and hopefully a few of these examples have got you thinking about things you may want to focus in on as you create your international strategy.
Wherever you decide to customize the local experience, don't forget that there's schema.org structured markup for multiple scenarios, which all help search engines to better understand your content. When search engines understand your content in the context of the languageand location it's meant to serve, they can provide the most relevant results possible to the most relevant users for you.
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