Finding out how your hreflang tags are generated can be extremely helpful in identifying the sources of different issues or mitigating potential risks.
So speak to your engineering team and ask them how you’re currently generating hreflang.
5. Implement Hreflang Without Errors
There are three ways to implement hreflang on your site:
On your sitemap.
Through your HTTP header.
On your HTML head.
The method most of us are most familiar with is the HTML head. And while you can use more than one method, they should match each other perfectly. Otherwise, you risk confusing search engines.
Here are some basic rules for getting it done correctly:
In your hreflang implementation, the URL must include domain and protocol.
You must follow the ISO 639-1 language codes – don’t go around making up your own.
Hreflang tags must be reciprocal. If the page you’re listing as a language alternative does not list you back, your implementation won’t work.
Audit your hreflang regularly. My favorite tool for this, since it added the hreflang cluster analysis and link graphs, is Ahrefs. For the record, Ahrefs is not paying me to say this; it’s a genuine recommendation and has helped me a lot in my work.
You should only have one page per language.
Your hreflang URLs should be self-canonicalizing and respond with a 200 code.
Follow the above rules, and you’ll avoid the most common hreflang mistakes that SEO pros make.
And if you’re interested in the technical SEO aspect beyond hreflang, I recommend reading Mind your language by Rob Owen.
Part III: Invest In Content Incrementally
6. Translate Your Top-performing Content Topics
Now that you have the basic commercial and technical knowledge covered, you’re ready to start creating a content strategy.
You likely have a wealth of content in your core market that can be recycled. But you want to focus on translating high-converting topics, not just any topic; otherwise, you might be wasting your budget!
Let’s go step by step.
Cluster Your Website’s Content By Topic
Crawl your site using your favorite SEO tool and extract the URL and H1.
Use ChatGPT to classify that list of URLs into topics. You might already know what you usually write about, so include those topics in your prompt. You don’t want to have a classification that’s too granular, so you can prompt chatGPT to only create groups with a minimum of 10 URLs (adjust this to reflect the size of your website) and class everything else as other. This is an example of what your prompt might look like: “I will provide you with a list of article titles and their corresponding URL. Classify this list into the following topics: survey best practices, research and analysis, employee surveys, market research and others. Return this in a table format with the URL, title and group name.”
Start a spreadsheet with all your URLs in the first column, titles in the second column, and the group they belong to in the third column.
Measure Your Performance By Topic
Export your GSC data and use a =VLOOKUP formula to match your clicks to your URLs.
Export your conversion data and use a =VLOOKUP formula to match your conversions (leads, sales, sign-ups, or revenue) to the right URL.
You can then copy your topics column onto a new sheet. Remove duplicates and use the =SUMIF formula to aggregate your click data and conversion data by topic.
Choose What Topics You’ll Be Translating First
Using this data, you can now choose what topics are most likely to drive conversions based on your core market data. Choose how many topics or pieces of content you’ll be translating based on your budget.
Personally, I like translating one topic at a time because I’ve found that generating topical authority on one specific topic makes it easier for me to rank on an adjacent topic that I write about next.
7. Localize Your English Content
Once you’re set up with all your key pages and a few content topics, it’s time to evaluate your investment and see where you could be getting a bigger return.
At this stage, many companies have translated their content into a few different languages and likely copied the US content into their UK and Australian sites. Now that you’ve done some translation, it’s time to work on localization.
If you’ve just copied your US content into your UK and Australian sites, your Google Search Console indexing report might be screaming at you, “Duplicate, Google selected a different canonical than the user.”
A very easy fix that could yield great returns is to localize your English content to the nuances of those English-speaking markets.
You will want to instruct your translation and localization providers to adapt the spellings of certain words, change the choice of words, introduce local expressions, and update any cited statistic for the US with their local equivalent.
For example, if I’m targeting a British audience, “analyze” becomes “analyse,” a “stroller” becomes a “pram,” and “soccer” becomes “football.”
8. Invest In In-market Content
Once you’ve got the basics in place, you can start tackling the specific needs of other markets. This strategy is expensive, and you should only use it in your priority markets, but it can really set you apart from your competitors.
For this, you will need to work with a local linguist to identify pain points, use cases, or needs exclusive to your target market.
For example, if France suddenly made it mandatory to run a diversity and inclusion study for companies with over 250 employees, I’d want to know this and create some content on DEI surveys at SurveyMonkey.
9. Integrate With Other Content Workflows
In step six, we evaluated our top-performing content, chose the best articles to translate, and got it all down. But wait. Some of these source articles have been updated. And there is even more content now!
To run a successful international SEO campaign you must integrate with all the other teams publishing content within your organization.
Usually, the teams creating content in an organization are SEO, content, PR, product marketing, demand generation, customer marketing, customer service, customer education, or solutions engineering.
That’s a lot, and you won’t be able to integrate with everyone all at once. Prioritize the teams that create the most revenue-generating content, such as SEO, content, or product marketing.
Working with these teams, you will have to establish a process for what happens when they create a new piece, update some content, or remove an existing piece.
These processes can differ for everyone, but I can tell you what I do with my team and hope it inspires you.
When a piece of content that’s already been localized into international markets is updated, we get the content in a queue to be re-localized the next quarter.
When they create a new piece of content, we evaluate its performance, and if it’s performing above average, we add it to a localization queue for the next quarter.
When they change the URL of a piece of content or delete it, all international sites must follow suit at the same time, since due to some technical limitations, not making the change globally would create some hreflang issues.
Wrapping Up
International SEO is vast and complex, and no article can cover it all, but many interesting resources have been created by SEO pros across the community for those who want to learn more.
Navigating the complexities of international SEO is no small feat. It’s an intricate dance of aligning commercial strategies with technical precision, cultural insights, and data-driven decisions.
From understanding your company’s core motives for global expansion to meticulously implementing hreflang tags and localizing content, every step plays a crucial role in building a successful international presence.
More resources:
Featured Image: BritCats Studio/Shutterstock