As businesses expand their reach globally, ensuring their websites are optimized for multilingual audiences becomes crucial. In a recent video on Google Search Central’s YouTube channel, Martin Splitt, a developer advocate from Google, shared valuable SEO tips for managing multilingual websites.
These tips address critical aspects such as website structure, hreflang attributes, and language selection to help you optimize your site for international audiences.
1. Optimize Your Website Structure for International Reach
Splitt recommends structuring your website in one of three ways when targeting international users:
- Local top-level domains (e.g., .fr, .de)
- Subdomains (e.g., fr.yoursite.com)
- Subdirectories (e.g., yoursite.com/fr/)
Each structure has its pros and cons, so choose the one that aligns best with your business goals. For instance, local top-level domains provide stronger localization signals but are harder to manage, while subdirectories are easier to maintain but may offer less localization impact.
2. Implement Hreflang Attributes Correctly
Hreflang attributes help search engines identify the correct language or regional version of a webpage. Splitt’s recommendations for using hreflang attributes include:
- Using valid language and country code combinations (e.g., en-US, fr-CA)
- Ensuring all language versions are linked together
- Including self-referential hreflang tags for each version
By implementing hreflang attributes correctly, you ensure that search engines deliver the right language version of your site to users in different regions, thus improving search visibility.
3. Allow Users to Select Their Language
Instead of auto-redirecting users based on their assumed location or language preference, Splitt advises giving them the option to choose their preferred language. Auto-redirecting can create a poor user experience, and it might prevent search engines from properly crawling other language versions.
By providing clear language-switching options, you’ll not only enhance the user experience but also make it easier for search engines to discover and index all language versions of your site.
Bonus Tip: Focus on Quality International Content
Splitt emphasizes that quality matters more than quantity when expanding into international markets. He advises against overextending your international SEO efforts by targeting too many locales. Instead, focus on the regions and languages that are essential to your business, ensuring you offer high-quality, localized content.
Why These Tips Matter
International SEO can be complex, but by following these guidelines, you can significantly improve your site’s global visibility and user experience. Proper website structure, effective use of hreflang, and allowing users to select their language will make your multilingual SEO efforts more effective.
For more details, check out Google’s official documentation and best practices for multilingual SEO.
