How to SEO for Spanish-Speaking People in California
-
I found myself in need of translating our current website into Spanish language so that we can target the Spanish-speaking population of L.A. and surrounding areas.
I have several questions:
1. What should my url structure be? ex: domain.com/es/subpage
would that work?2. Do I need to worry about any header information? Do I just translate the whole thing into Spanish with meta info etc..? What about rel="canonical", what do I need to do with the spanish translated pages?
Any other tips for SEO in Spanish? I plan on hiring a translator to translate the entire website into Spanish and thought about putting it in its own sub-directory, for example: domain.com/es/
Thanks for looking!
-
Glad I could help. If you any other assistance, don't hesitate to drop me a line.
-
Zeph, great advice on their heritage and translation not being literal. I did not think about this...
-
The advice that eyepac is offering you is pretty sound.
Geotarget for US? Check
Hreflang? Check My go to resource for how to do this is http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2232347/A-Simple-Guide-to-Using-relalternate-hreflangx
Using a subdirectory rather than a subdomain is the right way to go for sure. It allows your authority to trickle down to your Spanish site, making it significantly easier to rank.
What I would add is that translation is a tricky business...so keep the following in mind:
The vast majority of Spanish speakers in Los Angeles are of Mexican heritage. Make sure your translator is also.
Make them understand that the translation should not be literal. Otherwise you end up with some terrible misunderstandings and terrible text.
Have someone vet the translation before you put it up on your site. It could be a different translator, or if possible a current Spanish speaking customer (they will be in the best position to judge whether or not the translation is adequate.
Hope this helps, feel free to ask follow up questions!
-
I plan on hiring someone who has done it in my niche. Your post is too long to read to be honest, but thanks for the info. It's my fault I'm lazy that way
-
Don't forget to make sure the translation is well done.
See my blog post.
-
Cool, thanks.
-
Hi,
First of all if you don't want to target LATAM or Spain you will need to setup in Web master Tools the target as US - even if the language is spanish.
Also very important is the use of hreflang attribute that you need to setup on those translated pages - this is very important. For more on hreflang see the google official resource at: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
As far as structure /es like you've mention should be more then fine. No need to have any special settings or anything but is good to have everything in a separate folder.
Just my 2c.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
International SEO setup issues canonical URL
My site is www.grocare.com for one region and in.grocare.com for another region. Both of them have the same content except the currency for particular regions. Someone told me that google will take the content as duplicate and not rank either. I have setup hreflang and targeted different regions for both in the search console. I read many article which say canonical urls need to be setup for international seo sites. But Im not sure how to setup canonical urls and whether they are the right way to go . i just don't want my content deranked. Now i have setup hreflang properly after asking the moz community itself. So im hoping to get some help with this query too. TIA
International SEO | | grocare0 -
International SEO
Okay, so I have read through the following link in respect to International SEO (https://mza.seotoolninja.com/learn/seo/international-seo), and I believe that the way forward it a ccTLD. My thought was to have .com, .co.uk and .eu. Currently my site is .com, but receives most of its traffic from UK sources. I'm concerned that when I switch over to ccTLDs, the .co.uk in particular, that my UK traffic could dry up. Switching from .com to .co.uk and then using the .com to target the US market makes sense, but I would like to know others opinions on the potential dangers of doing this. Also, are ccTLDs kept on the same hosting or would they require individual hosting? The link doesn't cover this question.
International SEO | | moon-boots1 -
International SEO strategy for an ecommerce with 3 languages.
Hi all, I've an ecommerce which ships worldwide and we maintain 3 languages, spanish, english and french. My main business is in Spain, so spanish will be shown in the root domain: http://domain.com/. English will have the /en/ subdomain and french the /fr/ subdomain. After some research, I've concluded that the best strategy for my business is the following. 1º- Translate all the URL's to the correct language, since now are in spanish. 2º- Implement Hreflang tag (with self-reference): Note: Due to the "universality" of english, Does it make sense? Or should I use spanish as default since it's the most important one. 3º- Create the 3 sites in Search Console and only geo targetting french sobdomain to France. Since I really want to boost in France rankings. Do you consider this as a contradiction with ? I could also target country in the hreflang. 4º- Add language tag in each language version: <meta name="language" content="spanish">in http://domain.com/</meta name="language"> <code class="broncode"><meta name="language" content="english">in http://domain.com/en/</meta name="language"></code> <code class="broncode"><meta name="language" content="french">in http://domain.com/fr/</meta name="language"></code> <code class="broncode">5º- Use canonical tag together with hreflang.</code> ``` Any opinion will be very appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance! Best regards.
International SEO | | footd0 -
How to set up international SEO for english speaking countries
Hi, My company have offices around the world. However they also provide different services and products depending on the region. For example our offices in the USA, UK and Australia all provide different services to each other. My question is, how do I set up my WordPress website up to cater for these different countries and services? I think the simple answer would be to build a separate website for each, but this would be too costly and we don't have the resources to maintain all three. Many thanks for your time, Tom
International SEO | | CoGri0 -
Dutch SEO Professionals
Hi, I am seeking a fluent Dutch speaker to assist with the On-page optimisation for a Dutch mini site for a world wide engineering company. Any recommendations are welcome..
International SEO | | kpaulin0 -
Same domain with different google effect seo ?
I have a domain www.abc.com for US market. Now i want to sell same services in Australia. I am thinking to buy www.abc.com.au . Because i think i will get rank more faster for .au in Australia because of .au . What do you guys suggest ?
International SEO | | afycon0 -
What is the best SEO site structure for multi country targeting?
Hi There, We are an online retailer with four (and soon to be five) distinct geographic target markets (we have physical operations in both the UK and New Zealand). We currently target these markets like this: United Kingdom (www.natureshop.co.uk) New Zealand (www.natureshop.co.nz) Australia (www.natureshop.com/au) - using a google web master tools geo targeted folder United States (www.natureshop.com) - using google web master tools geo targeted domain Germany (www.natureshop.de) - in german and yet to be launched as full site We have various issues we want to address. The key one is this: our www.natureshop.co.uk website was adversely affected by the panda update on April 12. We had some external seo firms work on this site for us and unfortunately the links they gained for us were very low quality, from sometimes spammy sites and also "keyword" packed with very littlle anchor text variation. Our other websites (the .co.nz and .com) moved up after the updates so I can only assume our external seo consultants were responsible for this. I have since managed to get them to remove around 70% of these links and we have bought all seo efforts back in house again. I have also worked to improve the quality of our content on this site and I have 404'ed the six worst affected pages (the ones that had far too many single phrase anchor text links coming into them). We have however not budged much in our rankings (we have made some small gains but not a lot). Our other weakness's are not the fastest page load times and some "thin" content. We are on the cusp (around 4 weeks away) of deploying a brand new platform using asp.net MVP with N2 and this looks like it will address our page load speed issues. We also have been working hard on our content building and I believe we will address that as well with this release. Sorry for the long build up, however I felt some background was needed to get to my questions. My questions are: Do you think we are best to proceed with trying to get our www.natureshop.co.uk website out of the panda trap or should we consider deploying a new version of the site on www.natureshop.com/uk/ (geo targeted to the UK)? If we are to do this should we do the same for New Zealand and Germany and redirect the existing domains to the new geo targeted folders? If we do this should we redirect the natureshop.co.uk pages to the new www.natureshop.com/uk/ pages or will this simply pass on the panda "penalty". Will this model build stronger authority on the .com domain that benefit all of the geo targeted sub folders or does it not work this way? Finally can we deploy the same pages and content on the different geo targeted sub folders (with some subtle regional variations of spelling and language) or will this result in a duplicate content penalty? Thank you very much in advance to all of you and I apologise for the length and complexity of the question. Kind Regards
International SEO | | ConradC
Conrad Cranfield
Founder: Nature Shop Ltd0 -
Do non-english(localized) URLs help Local SEO and user experience?
Hi Everyone, This question is about URL best practice for multilingual websites. We have www.example.com in English and we are building the exact replica of English site in German www.example.de. On the Geman site, we are considering to translate some portions of the URLs for example last folder and file name as seen below: example.de/folder1-in-english/folder2-in-english/folder3-in-german/filename-in-german.html Is this a good idea? Will this help SEO and user experience both? or the mixed languagues in URL will confuse the users? Google guidelines say that this should be ok. Would love to get feedback from SEOMOZ community! Thanks, Supriya.
International SEO | | Amjath0