}
Jojo Furnival
Sitebulb's Patrick Hathaway is joined on October 23 by Gianluca Fiorelli, Raquel González Expósito, and Zeph Snapp to chat all things international SEO and localization.
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Webinar transcript
Patrick Hathaway:
Hi everyone, we're back with another webinar and today we're going to be talking about international SEO and localization. Thank you all for joining, we really appreciate you being here. My name is Patrick and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Sitebulb. We have some incredible guests for you today. Please welcome Gianluca Fiorelli, Raquel Gonzalez and Zeph Snapp, who is joining us very shortly but having some classic technical issues. We'll get on with the pre-webinar intro and hopefully Zeph can join us very shortly. So, I can see plenty of folks already in the chat who've joined our webinars before, welcome back to you all. And for any new faces, a big hello to you all as well.
If you want to find out as soon as we release future webinars, please sign up on our website. Jojo will pop the link in the chat if you want to go ahead and sign up while I cover a couple of small bits of housekeeping. So, we are recording the webinar today and we'll be sending the recording out tomorrow, so don't worry if you're not able to make for the whole thing, you'll be able to catch up later. We will also have some time at the end of the webinar for your questions, so please put them in the Q&A tab next to the chat box, not actually the chat itself. You can also upvote other people's questions in there if you can't think of any yourself. We've got Sitebulb's marketing manager, Jojo with us today also behind the scenes. She's hanging out in the chat and helping with the questions so please go ahead and say hi to her.
And yes, so let me introduce our incredible guests today. So, Gianluca Fiorelli is an international SEO consultant collaborating with companies worldwide to help improve their national or international visibility in organic search. We also have Raquel Gonzalez who is a freelance SEO consultant and localization specialist. And her specialties include international and multilingual SEO. Now, last but by no means least, but actually not yet here, we have also have Zeph Snapp with us today, hopefully. Zeph is the CEO and founder of Altura Interactive, a specialist agency that provides Spanish digital marketing to international companies and agencies. Welcome and thank you all so much for joining us today.
Gianluca Fiorelli:
It's a pleasure to be here.
Raquel Gonzalez:
Thank you for having us.
Patrick Hathaway:
So, let's start at the beginning. What factors do you look at to help determine that a localization project makes business sense? Gianluca, any ideas?
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Well, this is a of classic question but we'll need an entire webinar to be answered.
Patrick Hathaway:
Let's hear it.
Gianluca Fiorelli:
No, but to make it short, I usually ask a lot of questions to a client when it comes to me asking for international SEO consultancy. Also, because it's a way to understand what kind of priorities we can set up. I usually ask him a few questions like, I mean, you are contacting me for this project because I think you already have done the work at home and so you know that you have this business interest in expanding in international market. So, I ask him, "Are you already receiving traffic from this market or from people using this language?" Or "Do you see also that you have some kind of positive feedback in terms of conversion subscription whatsoever?"
So, this is to start understanding what kind of visibility apart from the classic search visibility the website already have. And then I also ask him, "Are you going to have also ..." For instance, in case of big brands which have a physical presence in their country or in other markets, if they are going to have also a physical presence in the new markets? Or if not, how they are going to deal with this kind of situation if we are going to spend physically in the future. Then I start to ask, depending on the type of business, for instance, if it's a classic betting, gambling, "Do you have everything? I imagine that you have everything in place in terms of legal issues, because maybe you want to enter a thing in Spain and you don't have all the precise authorization, legal authorization to operate as a gambler, a gambling website.
Or as it happened to me, you have the licences for Mexico but you don't have the licence for the US. And this can be a problem because you cannot show your products of gambling in the US. And [inaudible 00:05:07] comes usually from the US. So, you have to find ways to make this content controllable and visible to go. So I usually do this. I really ask what are the prioritisation in terms of expansion both language and country, or only language or only country whatsoever in order to start prioritising work. This is what I do.
Patrick Hathaway:
Awesome. Well, we now have Zeph with us as well, so hi and welcome Zeph.
Zeph Snapp:
Hi, I'm so sorry. I was trying to do this on a very nice podcasting setup that I have with one of my phones, but the software apparently wanted me to use a browser, so I had to run and get... Yeah, anyhow... Nice to be here.
Patrick Hathaway:
Here we go. Yes, well, thanks for joining. I've already introduced you. And we've just started off with thinking about what kind of factors you look at to help determine if a localization project makes business sense. And so that's what Gianluca was just sort of enlightening us on. I suppose as well, Zeph. Could you maybe expand on where you think, what sort of validation you might be able to do if they haven't actually done this themselves?
Zeph Snapp:
So we usually lead with search traffic and then market size and audience. And sometimes this is going to be the same as what they do in their home country, but in many cases it's going to be different based on where they are. So for example, a product that might be going after younger people in the United States, if they're going to enter Latin America, while the younger person might be the end user, the actual client, the person who's going to pay for things might be their parents, and so you have to make sure that there's an audience size, there's enough that there's enough demand for it for both audiences to be involved. So usually for us it's market size, it's commercial potential and it's either validation by competition, is someone else doing this but maybe not as well or coming from a different angle? Or is it being done poorly?
Those are sort of areas where we look at it and we go, "Well, there's a good commercial opportunity for you there." And usually we do this via an assessment when we're getting started. We go and look at who else is working in their vertical and what the advantages they'll have going in. And our baseline is usually what we're looking for is to ensure that the cost of acquisition is going to be somewhere between 30% and 50% of what they're accustomed to paying in the United States or whatever country they're in.
Patrick Hathaway:
Interesting. Raquel, anything to add to these perspectives?
Raquel Gonzalez:
Yeah, basically they said almost everything, but I like to see before deciding if you have to enter a new market or if you have to allocate your localization efforts, I like to divide it in two sections. One is market research, and another, your internal resources as a company. So as they well said, first, research your market, see if the product or the service that you're trying to expand there is a need for the customers, because if there's no need for it, there's no point in trying make the effort. And also check if you already have customers from that country having some interest in your product.
You can see Google Analytics or any analytics tool that you want. And then if you finally decide that you want to expand to that market, make sure that you have the resources to make it... Even if you hire somebody to do the localization process, you still need an ongoing maintainment or if you want to add new content, you have to have somebody there to look at it and make sure everything is correct. Also, you need a local vendor that can talk to your customers there. So yeah, make sure that you can afford all of that, validate your cost and your resources and then you can make a decision.
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah, I mean we actually have reasonably regularly we'll get Sitebulb customers that come to us and say, "Could you translate into this language or that language?" And one of my main concerns is always, okay, even if we did do that as a project, we then probably can't provide support in that language as well. So we'd have to pick and choose and it's one of the reasons we haven't yet done it. Yes, that's a really interesting perspective as well.
Gianluca Fiorelli:
If I may add a last thing? In fact, at the end of the day, the international SEO is really, really related to be a good manager substantially. Because you have to deal with, not only to present a strategy, not only to resolve all the technical issues like the hreflang and so on, and doing localization, but then it's really about as a consultant, in my case, to be sort of executive producer in a movie. I have to coordinate a lot of people both internal, or in the company, both external, et cetera. Because this is, substantially what I've solves the 60%, 70% of the time as an international SEO. Managing people because... Yeah,
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah. Project management stuff, right?
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Yeah, because they have to work in synchronicity.
Patrick Hathaway:
Awesome. So let's just say you did get to a point where it had been decided that you were working on or the company's working on a localization project. So starting from an existing site and then moving into a new market, how do you determine which pages justify being translated?
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Well, to be logical, everything should be translated. But then let's say what we mean, we've translated. If we mean at first a translation that should be all the pages substantially. But then you have to immediately prioritise the one that really matters, which usually are the home page, I'm taking the example of an e-commerce. The home page, the main category pages and the product for you are the most relevant. These are the first one where you have to fully localise. And then following from a medium to lower prioritisation chart for instance, you go with the other things. Consider that for instance, all the [inaudible 00:12:47] content, it's relatively easy to localise very fast, and this can be done even on a stage, pre launch, go live situation. Then also everything, maybe the things like the title text, the description, [inaudible 00:13:05], all this classic, home page SEO should be present in every part.
So now you can also try for instance in e-commerce, but it can be a classified real estate. Many of these things can be relatively finely well automated with in terms of localization with rules. So you give the rules to the copywriters and all these can be done. Now, we also have these wonderful tools like LLMs to make things faster in this sense, so you can substantially create a draught with this, go with this online and then review when you are already live. Because the problem is that if you want to localise perfectly everything, and maybe you have a multi-country website targeting five countries and free global language, the project maybe set up to go live in three months, it's going to go live in one here.
So yeah, sure, surely you have to prioritise this way. You can go with a translated version immediately, but at the same time, you have to prioritise your own page, your main category pages, your most important landing pages and product pages with a localised translation, which can be started with an automated translation tool, but really have improved, but surely immediately review by a native translator. And then schedule all the other thing for localization. Then there should be also an even further step, which should be maybe it comes with time, but you really need to serve a message, but using a totally different messaging system when you're using your own country version. Because something, a way of talking to an American customer can be totally different or nonsensical for let's say, a Turkish or an Italian. So you have to really do what is called transmedia, trans... Transmedia is...
Zeph Snapp:
Transcreation is the word you're looking for Gianluca.
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Transcreation. Yeah, do the transcreation.
Zeph Snapp:
That's all right. It happens. The only thing I was going to add to that too is, and I'm sorry for, I think we should probably move on to the next question, but the other thing that I think is really important to consider is that your basic assumptions about your customer need to be reevaluated whenever you're under a new market. So the idea that you'll need to make the same explanation to a customer in the United States as you would to a customer in Chile is something that you have to review. Because the knowledge base or the fundamental underlying reasons why they're arriving at your product may be different and may require a more in-depth explanation of terms or of the requirements in order for you to have success with the product. So it's important to analyse that fully before you enter the market and make decisions. And that will also affect your localization and translation efforts. Okay. I'll keep quiet.
Patrick Hathaway:
I do want to dig into though, the almost like Gianluca, like you just said, you can start off maybe with a basic translation, but then localization is a different thing entirely. Raquel, can you give us a bit of the difference between the two and help us understand what you might need to do to fully localise something that has maybe already had a base level translation?
Raquel Gonzalez:
So basically translation is just conveying the message from the source language to the target languages. But when you add localization, you also add this layer of cultural awareness. You have to keep in mind the cultural nuances of that country. You can localise currency, measurements, anything that makes sense in that country. Localization is broad, it's not only text, it can be anything. It can be, for example, if we are talking about websites, it can be the visual layout of the website, how it adapts. It can be the colours that you use, it can be the images that you use. Some images might not be respectful for the culture. So it's basically just-
Zeph Snapp:
The image part is really important. That's what you just said, is so important because a lot of websites will just be full of white people or white and African-American people because that's what they're used to using. And they'll try and use those same images for their landing pages that they're doing when they do a localization. And it's insensitive to manage it that way. Maybe it'll work, but it's not the right thing to do. So I'm sorry for interrupting, but I wanted to really-
Raquel Gonzalez:
No, no, you're right, you're right.
Zeph Snapp:
... nail that because you made a great point.
Raquel Gonzalez:
Nothing. People think about translation or localization just about the text, but then there's those little trades or nuances that you cannot forget. So yeah, basically that's the difference.
Patrick Hathaway:
Awesome. Love it. All right, so let's switch the focus slightly now in these questions. So everything we've discussed so far has revolved around the setup or sort of starting a translation or a localization project. But often as consultants you often find yourself coming into a situation. I think as you alluded to already, Gianluca where a lot of this work has already been done. So I want to know what common issues you see when it comes to internationalisation, but both in terms of technical issues but also non-technical stuff. Almost like we've just been talking about.
Gianluca Fiorelli:
I've seen things many things, so during this 20 years-
Zeph Snapp:
That sounds like The Sixth Sense, right? "I see dead people."
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah, I've seen many things.
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Yes. Or Blade Runner.
Zeph Snapp:
I can see you having flashbacks.
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Yes, like Blade Runner, "I have seen things that you human..." Well, the technical side, the biggest problem that I saw constantly is seeing the international SEO, let's call it markup, hreflang substantially, practically screw up. Maybe it's correct in theory what we have done, but it's totally screw up because their website is screw up. Because their canonicalization is wrong, because they're using no index correctly. So the classic technical SEO basis for one country website are totally incorrect to be fixed. Because if they are not fixed, the hreflang breaks. It used to break really easily. If your canonicalization is wrong, your hreflang is going not to be considered, because it pretends to indicate canonicals as alternative.
If your noindex or let's say indexing policy is wrong, then you are going to have problems because the alternate URLs, the hreflang must be indexable, canonical and respond to hundreds. Anything else is wrong. So if you are having problem in general is, you're going to have problem in VHS too. Then talking about hreflang, some confusion about what it is really. For instance, where hreflang x-default, uses as it was something like the jolly card for targeting whatever you want. Is not really so. Or trying to target impossible countries because with a version, because you can target, you reuse the same URL as a alternate for whatever combination of language plus country. And I've seen website trying to target countries like the most-
Zeph Snapp:
English in Germany, for example.
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Yes, this is a classic example or this is very typical of the American website, trying to target all the countries in Europe with English. When actually only in UK in Ireland is justified. Apart, I mean I understand it for some very specific
Zeph Snapp:
Also the hreflang being set up. Well, also the hreflang being set up and people using the wrong nomenclature for the country, right? So if you're targeting Great Britain or something like that
Patrick Hathaway:
Like UK.
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Yeah.
Zeph Snapp:
Exactly, and that's a very common mistake and it's one of those things just happens.
Gianluca Fiorelli:
There's recently a... So using the hreflang and trying to target Australia just with the code, AUS, which doesn't even exist without indicating the language language is funda... You have always to put the language. And then in terms of localization, I saw before I was saying that the automated translation tools are improving, which is true, but still there are other things like Google Translate that are still stucking a lot. And I've seen websites essentially using only the translation made up with Google Translate. And it was really funny, I mean tragic for them, but really funny for me especially when I was able to fully understand the translation, maybe because it was in Spanish or in Italian for which I'm substantially native. And I saw "Go daddy," you are going to laugh a lot Zeph and Rachel, it was translated literally like this, "Vai papito." "Vas papito." Go daddy.
So a really literal translation, which is ridiculous, many times can cause hilarious situation. So these are the most common situation that I've seen. But then yes, or there are more nuance of the situation like using, let's say for instance in the case of Spanish, using the Spanish that we talk here in Spain to target the Hispanic-American countries, when we know that the Spanish is quite different. Or using jargons or even keywords that are used in the American English to target UK English. The classic difference between pants and trousers for instance. So these are common things.
Zeph Snapp:
Raquel, what are things that you see that are frequent mistakes that you see when you're auditing existing internationalisation efforts?
Raquel Gonzalez:
So until now, I haven't worked with very big clients, so maybe I don't find those wanting to target a lot of hreflang or languages stuff. But what I do find is mostly localization issues in terms of what Gianluca was saying before, a website is not fully translated, there's only bits of it. And I don't think that's the best solution, because it also can affect user experience. If you go to a website and you don't speak English, let's say, and it's translated into Spanish, but only half of it is translated, then you can potentially lose users because they don't feel comfortable navigating that website. They don't understand what your product is saying. Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Can I add one thing? But this I really start to seeing a lot, and it is related to programmatic SEO. So I see the application of programmatic to translation. And I remember Glassdoor in the beginning when I was I collaborated for them for the Italian version of Glassdoor. And Glassdoor is sold with programmatic and they created programmatic. We wanted to use the programmatic rule for English for the Italian, forgetting that Italian have singular and plural, feminine and masculine so that the programmatic rules were creating really impossible to read, really awful automated translation substantially because where tidbits of Italian combine thanks to this programmatic rules for content. This is a classic mistake I see.
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah. All right guys-
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Zeph, I see you smiling.
Raquel Gonzalez:
Also, I've seen the typical content duplication for example, the hreflang is well, is correct, but then for some reason Google is not ranking or indexing some pages and then you have to see what the problem is. Sometimes it's because some content is duplicate, like for example the blogs. The rest of the website is well translated, but the blogs are the same in English and Spanish and then you have to solve that because if not, Google is ranking one website over the other.
Zeph Snapp:
So I'd like to put a bow on this because I'm sure you'd like to move on to another question, Patrick. But you gave an example for your website and your presence that I thought was interesting where you said, "Hey, I'm concerned that I wouldn't be able to provide support for users in that language." And I think, so the best analogue that I can think of for that is the work that we did with Shopify when they went to market in Latin America. And so they were writing a lot of content about entrepreneurship and drop shipping and things like that because that was the order of the day. But they didn't translate the back end of their software for years afterwards.
And the justification that they gave when I asked them about it, and they did eventually do it, was that the type of people who were using their software might not speak English, but in a lot of cases they were programmers or understood programming. And so for them they were used to looking for resources in English or trying to understand the way software function in English. So they didn't need support in their language necessarily help, but they didn't really need the support documents and all that. What they needed was to get people in the front end knowing that those people would have a working knowledge of English and they'd be able to do that. And that's not true for every product or every service. But with something like yours for example, I think people would be so grateful just to have the information in a way that was more digestible for them on the front end that not having the back end translated is not as much a barrier as you would think and you don't necessarily... So that's all.
Patrick Hathaway:
So kind of like the output-
Zeph Snapp:
I'm not saying you should do it tomorrow.
Patrick Hathaway:
... output rather the input. Right?
Zeph Snapp:
Exactly. Now in this case, they probably want the output to be their language because they're trying to present it to people who don't speak English and they want to see this in a different language. So yours is a slightly different case, but it's just something that I want to encourage people to do it even if they don't feel like they're all the way ready, because there's more benefits than downside if you do it strategically.
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah. That's fair. Well, we've also got loads of really cool questions coming in from-
Zeph Snapp:
Yes.
Patrick Hathaway:
So I will move us along. We'll move away from technical, so it's some reasonable technical stuff we've already discussed. I wanted to just also explore what other market specific aspects that might require localization. How do you handle social, digital PR, content marketing when moving into a different market? I think you mentioned this, Raquel in that blog post, just a really good blog post for Sitebulb recently, and you mentioned link building in particular. What sort of differences might you need to think about for that?
Raquel Gonzalez:
So obviously, you don't only focus on SEO. If you want to go into a new market, you also have to consider social media for example. You have to get into what platforms your users are using, because every country might be different. And also create content or adapt the content for that platform. Also content marketing, as I said, not everything is technical, you have to have a good content strategy and one thing that I see a lot is companies that have a blog and they maybe are being successful in their market, let's say in the English language. But then they just localise those blocks and then maybe that information is not useful for those users. So you also have to keep in mind is that information or is that the idea of that article going to help those end users in another country or do you have to adapt the strategy? [inaudible 00:32:16]-
Patrick Hathaway:
Would that go as far as thinking about the marketing funnel in this market looks like this, but over here it needs to look like this? The different phases work differently?
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Totally. I mean it's really about knowing the audience, the local audience. And for instance, in social, I subscribe everything Raquel said. And in terms of content marketing in blogs for instance, the classic magazine, it's illogical that Spanish, British have the same interest for instance. Also, because of seasonality, is something silly like this. I remember when I worked for another chain, they had a superb magazine in Spanish. And it was simply localised in English and German and other languages. The problem is that the content calendar was substantially scheduled over the interest of the Spanish people and not over the interest localised also the content calendar. This is a classic mistake. So what happens that a really, really simple example, I didn't know that existed place on the coast in Bulgaria, which is substantially the, you will understand Patrick, the Bulgarian Benidorm.
So it's a really cheap place for having a sea vacation in the east of Europe and it's really popular for German people. And it's something like you should write about this place for the German version of your magazine, but because this place is totally unknown for the Spanish market, this magazine never, never wrote anything about this place. And so the big wonderful five-star hotel, [inaudible 00:34:15] chain add in that place never was receive any love from the company itself. And this was a waste of business opportunity attacking the top of the funnel for that tourist destination, for instance.
Something similar I did when I visited California.com back in the days. And they really asked me to substantially work on this, how can we try to localise the content for the specific audience that we have internationally? So the UK audience, the Mexican audience, the European in general and so on. So the biggest work for me in their case wasn't anything technical, but was really to understand what, using Google trends, Google search volumes, a combination of data to see what places are the most interesting for a Mexican, for a German person, for an Australian, for the American itself in United States. And so create a balance in the content localised content calendar. For link building then, it's sad to say, but digital PR is not so well known in many countries. So if you think that a digital PR campaign that you maybe have done with success in the UK will work also, I don't know, in Italy, probably not.
Patrick Hathaway:
You can't replicate it. Yeah,
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Probably not, because the situation is quite different in terms of link building.
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah.
Zeph Snapp:
And this is our bread and butter at Altura. We're really, really good at reaching out and finding relevant websites that are in country or in language. That's like a very, very important part of the work we do, because it's something that's really, really difficult and it's only gotten more difficult over time. And so yeah, what got you there will not get you where you want to go. You're going to have to do things a different way.
Patrick Hathaway:
Awesome. All right, so we are... 2024, we can't have an SEO webinar without at least talking about AI. And in my experience of AI so far, probably the thing which I have seen it do best is understanding language and understanding meanings. Obviously, that's large language models, is kind of how it works. And so to me it seems that translation maybe not so much localization, but at least translation is something that AI should be able to be competent I suppose. What are your thoughts on this, using AI as part of a translation strategy and how do you avoid potential risks?
Zeph Snapp:
I hope you don't mind. I'm going to go first on this one. We've been playing with this since the very first versions of ChatGPT came out. And in fact, if we want to go back historically we worked with large language models for translation way before it was actually a thing. And for the most part, for the greater part of my career, it's been absolute shit. There's no other way to say it. It has improved significantly, but there's a difference between translating and copywriting. And it's really important to understand that difference. Now you can tell, so what we do for every client is, we build what we call basically just a brief, a design presence brief where we decide formal versus informal audience information terms that are in bounds terms that are out of bounds. So you can feed that into Claude or ChatGPT or whatever and have it push out a translation that takes this stuff into consideration, but it's still not going to write copy, it's going to translate.
And so I think that for product descriptions, snippets of text that are short, things like that, it's pretty good. But if you're talking about translating something like a blog post where you need to have insight and understanding, it's just more difficult. And honestly it shouldn't really be done because there's so much more that goes into it than that. But I do find a lot of companies are doing that early on with their translation work and we sometimes do a first draught with AI. The other issue too is, this is something that the generations after us, the younger people are getting really good at. And I've already cursed once, I'm going to go ahead and do it again Patrick, but they're much better at sniffing out the bullshit. And I mean this in the best possible way.
If you translate something with ChatGPT or Claude, it might sound okay to you and it might sound okay to me when I read it the first time, but it's inauthentic and users can feel that. And that's going to create friction for you. Because you're going to feel like a company and a place that didn't even take the time to really consider them enough to have a human do this job. And so the translated version is going to use keywords that make it fairly obvious. The one word that I've seen translated a lot is delighted. "I'd be delighted to help you." No one's going to write that for real.
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah, just-
Zeph Snapp:
But a machine will.
Patrick Hathaway:
... and then the-
Zeph Snapp:
Please.
Patrick Hathaway:
... the webinar we did, the last webinar we did, which was the AI webinar itself with Britney Muller, she literally had a list of buzzwords that AI loves to chuck in there. And obviously the same thing must happen with translation, right?
Zeph Snapp:
Exactly. And so I see for example, my fifteen-year-old son, the way that he consumes content and the way that he receives information, he can tell like that if it's inauthentic, it's second nature to him. And it's actually, it gives me hope for the younger generations because they have this incredible filter and an understanding of what is legitimate and what is not. And so you can do that and it's absolutely a first step if you need to dip your toe in the water to figure out whether or not this is the right thing for you. But I would discourage people from depending on AI to do their translations for things like that. Now if you want to build a chatbot that's based on your information, that's going to spit out answers and things like that, that's a really great use of AI. But for the translation of your web pages, or of the subtitles for your videos or of any of this other stuff, I really don't recommend it, especially if you're trying to present as a professional organisation.
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah, I love this quote in the chat from Faizon. "Translation is text copywriting is tone." Yeah, nice
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Exactly.
Zeph Snapp:
Spot on. Spot on.
Patrick Hathaway:
All right guys, I'm going to go, one more question and then we'll move to the Q&A from the audience. So I want to just look to the future for a second. So this summer there was one of the Google's Search Off the Record Podcasts, Gary Illyes commenting on there that Google may in the future rely less on hreflang and instead shift to automatic language detection. I want to know really if you've got any thoughts on this and would it impact how you would go about doing it in international SEO?
Gianluca Fiorelli:
I don't know. Sincerely, I think with that is, I also talk with the Bing people and also Bing would love to get rid of the hreflang. The problem is that maybe in the future if the natural language recognition is going to be really well done, perfected by Bing and Google and so on, maybe they could be able to understand if American English, British English, but problem is bad. Because for instance, for a multilingual website, so not targeting countries, I actually, it's quite a few years but in order to get rid of the hreflang issues, I say don't use the hreflang. I mean, Google is already good in understanding that this content is in Spanish, this content in German, and this content is in Italian. So for multilingual, I usually get, if my website is only multilingual, I get rid of hreflang directly.
The problem is when it's multi-country and there are more countries using the same general language because their nuances are really, really important. And no NLP system already has this ability to fully understand the nuances. But there is another problem, many websites target countries for instance in English like US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and so on using a standardised English, which is not even in English for American or in English for UK. So how natural language processing system would define that kind of language. So I don't see... There are a lot of problems, we have hreflang because it's totally bugged, but I don't think things are going to be so well. That-
Patrick Hathaway:
So straightforward. Yeah.
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Yeah. Because I mean just consider all the websites using the mythical function of copy paste from one US version to the UK version. How can Google recognise that this page is for the UK and this pages for the US if they don't have something like the hreflang? If it's only from content, if it's a-
Patrick Hathaway:
Raquel and Zeph, agree or disagree with the Gianluca theory on the future?
Raquel Gonzalez:
I agree that it will be a bit of a disaster if they remove hreflang. I think what Gianluca was saying, how are they going to recognise what country that content is for? Maybe if it's an e-commerce and it shows the price from that country and it's very specific from that country, or signals that show what country that content is for, maybe that could work. But if not, I see it very difficult to that Google is going to determine the right country or language for that content. So we'll see.
Zeph Snapp:
So here's the thing, Gianluca said it, they're already doing it. Language detection in Google is actually really good. The hreflang was really originally conceived to be a disambiguation tool and a way to separate duplicate content. So hreflang is really most useful, so you look at Latin America, if you have a physical, so let's say you're a Domino's Pizza and you need to disambiguate between your Mexico website, your Columbia website, your Chile website, it's all in Spanish, all almost identical text. You're giving the locations and all that. And that's what that's really for, is to make sure that we separate these out. From a language perspective, Google has language. If you're going to market to people based on language, you mostly don't need hreflang right now today. It's more if you're going to have the same website in the same language, like the example that Gianluca gave where you're doing English for five countries, that's where hreflang is useful.
But I think yeah, it's less important than it's ever been and it's only going to be less important than it is. Now, the fact is that, in other languages the search engine result pages are a crap shoot and in some cases they're really bad. But I don't think that the hreflang changing or going away is going to affect that significantly. I think it's going to be the same quality as it's been. And yes, Bill Hunt is the foremost expert in the world on hreflang. He built a piece of software that then sold. So please check out the blog post that was posted in the chat. I think that's a really good way of understanding what's happening and what's going to happen.
Patrick Hathaway:
Excellent. Right, great summary. Perfect. So we're going to move on now to Q&A from the attendees. Just a final reminder, if you've got any questions, pop them in right now and go through and if you upvote anymore. We will try and go from the ones upvoted most through to the bottom. So if there's anything you want to get answered, then go and get those upvotes in. If we can't cover everything today, we can try and follow up on social to get those or get those all answered for you. So let's start then. "So how would you advise implementing localised structured data for multinational markets or pages in language, et cetera?" Just structured data.
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Structured data is language agnostic. So you set up the substantially the structured data as it is in your main version. Structured data is agnostic. It's like when... It's really related to entity. So a manzana which is apple in English is always an apple independently from what language you're using. That's why a classic properties in the structured data is same as. So to indicate this thing is the same as this thing that is describing this Wikipedia page. And in the beginning the question was, "So when I use structured data for the Spanish website, I have to indicate the Spanish Wikipedia pages?" No, you can leave English Wikipedia pages all the same as property. So no structured data is the same.
Patrick Hathaway:
So what about product pricing offers and stuff like that in different currencies?
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Well, that product pricing in that case, yes. I mean, some specific information like for products, something like this, you have to indicate the currency that is used in the page, obviously. But I was meaning for something like article, you don't have to change anything. For something like web page website, you don't have to change anything and so on. Local business, obviously if you have a page with local content and address and you have to use what is present, but in terms... They are content somehow. So you are using content in the structure data that is on the page, but [inaudible 00:50:07] the structured data is language agnostic [inaudible 00:50:13]
Patrick Hathaway:
Okay. All right, let's move on then. So okay, we've got a long one. All right, "I've got a client who has just cloned their website. It is however the same language, Dutch and Belgium. They have an .nl and a .be now. Hreflang is correct, two site maps, two specific ccTLDs. Is there still a risk for duplicate content?" I'll leave that one up.
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Yes. Duplicate content and hreflang are two different things. So duplicating in this way, the website is creating two identical websites. So that's why sometimes Google folds up, they decide that okay, this website is for Flemish, Belgium and this one for Netherlands. And they are identical. I would fold up as consider canonical the Dutch version for instance, the NL. The hreflang in this case is what that was saying for disambiguating, despite whereas this duplication you are telling me to show for the Belgium user the Belgium URL. So I will do it, I will respect it. The problem is that sometimes Google still struggle to coordinate this thing.
Patrick Hathaway:
Is this where you sometimes see the Dutch version ranking in the Belgium [inaudible 00:51:41] that sort of thing?
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Yes. When the duplication is so identical, so 110%, yes, this is the effect of the folding up. The folding up, and... The problem is when Google decide what is [inaudible 00:52:00]. Last week I share on a case, a question was, "What happens if Google decide that my canonicalization is not the good one?" And so he decide that he choose the canonical, this can be the case that he choose the canonical, and so choosing the canonical itself is substantially screwing up your hreflang rules. So that may cause that the hreflang is not working and this makes-
Patrick Hathaway:
Jojo is moving us along. So she put another question on. "So we're localising content. Is it best to get in contact with local SEOs for that language or someone with that skill set enabling you to use the correct...?" Right. So yeah, this is a really interesting one because this kind of comes around to almost a lot of the questions we were asking previously. Let's get some different opinions on this.
Raquel Gonzalez:
I can go first
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah. Go for it.
Raquel Gonzalez:
So ideally I think you should go with an SEO translator that knows both the nuances of localization and that also knows how to do SEO, not just the very basic SEO like how to translate metadata or how to put a keyword here and there, somebody that understands properly how SEO functions. Because if you just get a translator and you make it work with an SEO specialist, there's going to be a moment where there's a disconnect. They should be working together and make sure that the text reads naturally, but at the same time it's well optimised. But if that translator doesn't know about SEO, he might not be able to do it. But if you only get local SEO, they don't know how to perform localization. There's techniques behind it, it's not just translating or make it look pretty in that language. So I think the best way if you can do it it's either getting an SEO translator that knows both worlds, or working with the insight team where they are constantly updating the process and they're working together all along.
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Totally.
Zeph Snapp:
I'm just going to add one detail to that. Thank you. Raquel. Is so one, this is basically what we do, but well the most important part of this for me is understanding query match. So the way that someone asks a question in English that is then answered by your webpage may not have the same nomenclature or even really the same intention in another language. And, so one thing is keyword research, you can translate your keyword list, you can throw it into the Google tools and pull out a version of it and that will give you a starting point. But as we know, all this really exists in the long tail. And in the long tail, well the query match to content is a different animal. And so I think understanding that relationship has to be at the basis for understanding your localization project. I think that's where a lot of people go wrong, is they don't go beyond the most superficial research that you can do to understand why users or how users are arriving or how you want them to arrive at your website.
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah, nice. Okay. This is interesting one. So yeah, "How do you stay up to date with search engine algorithm changes across different countries?" Like country specific stuff?
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Well, usually it's not anymore the time of Panda and Penguin when I remember Panda came to Europe, non-English speaking Europe, quite late. We respect US and first and then UK. So core updates run at the same time everywhere. Then-
Patrick Hathaway:
Actually, let me change the question. So not necessarily algorithm changes but different markets. Different market, what needs to actually move the needle in different markets?
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Let me talk about update again. But talking update, not in terms of classic updates, but in terms of what Google presents in themselves. Because this is really interesting. For instance, in Spain and in Italy, we still don't have things to know. In Europe, we don't... European Union, we don't have AI overview, we are safe. And so these are things that can be really interesting, what kind of difference features are present, because maybe you are creating a specific strategy for US that must consider these features that are not present if you are a Spanish company in Spain. Then in terms of what you were asking, sincerely, you have to understand that for instance, in some countries Google admit, we know that there is trillions and trillions of web pages in the world, but most of this content is in English.
So there are countries where not so much content is written about some specific topics, and that's why sometimes you see really [inaudible 00:58:02] ranking in the first page in that country. So it's easier for an SEO to... The competition is easier because you can compete. But you have to understand that sometimes there are specific situation or sometimes the link spam update is not really working in some countries because some countries are so spam that Google needs to save something.
Patrick Hathaway:
Otherwise, everything's gone. Right?
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Yeah, totally.
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah. Okay. Right. Any final thoughts? Oh, blimey. Okay, we're going to have one more question are we Jojo? All right, we are almost at time. So just in case Zeph, did you say you need head...?
Zeph Snapp:
I am going to drop out, but I like this question and so I'd like to give a short answer about it.
Patrick Hathaway:
Go then, go for it.
Zeph Snapp:
Look, so subdirectories is less than ideal because you are not leveraging the authority of your site. You're basically starting over from scratch when you do that. Sub-folders is what we prefer and that's where I would send you if you were saying what's the most important thing to ranking. But it's also really important to understand that there are business reasons for doing things, not just SEO reasons for doing things.
And so if you doing it on a subfolder on your... Is the most expedient way for you to get started, then so be it. Go for it. There's other things besides SEO to consider. But yeah, I would say know ccTLDs, subfolders and subdomains in that order would be the way that I would recommend if you were asking me my opinion. Thank you so much everyone for having me. I'm a little bit embarrassed about my technical issues, but it was really nice to be here. And Raquel, I already knew you Gianluca, but Raquel was really nice to meet you. I hope we get to connect again in the future.
Gianluca Fiorelli:
Hope to see you soon, Zeph.
Patrick Hathaway:
Yeah, thank you very much, Zeph, great to see you. Well we are now at time anyway, so that's all we've got time for today. So thank you so much for watching everybody and for your fantastic questions. Huge thanks, of course go to Raquel, Zeph and Gianluca for so generously giving up the time and expertise. As I mentioned before, we'll be publishing the webinar tomorrow, so we'll be emailing that out to everyone who registered.
And if you missed the start, don't worry, you can catch up. Our next webinar is on Wednesday, the 27th of November where we'll be talking about site migrations and AI-powered redirect mapping. A reminder that you can sign up to our webinar mailing list via the link sitebulb.com/resources/webinars. If you sign up there, you'll get an email as soon as we announce a new webinar with the opportunity to save your seat. So thank you everyone again for watching. See you all on the next one. Bye-Bye
