Language for URLs on new international websites

[RyanCrawf1984]

We are due to launch our new site and it will be targeting an international market.

We have setup these new sites in the following way

• www.website.com/fr/content-goes-here
• www.website.com/es/content-goes-here

This has been done in conjunction with setting up the parameters in GWT and making sure it is optimised for the language itself, and that countries search engine.

But our web dev team have said that the URLs at the moment will be in english and not the native language, so if you were on the french version of our site you would see the url in english and not french.

Will this negatively affect the site for SEO, and who else would think it would be negative from a usability perspective?

Any help is appreciated.

[Prospector-Plastics]

Having the keyword terms in urls in the native language is certainly a better user experience for both searchers and your website visitors. As part of Google's algorithm, keywords in the url do have some influence - this item even appears in the Moz Analytics On-Page Grader tool showing Keyword Usage in URL as Moderately Important.

If the IT team can only provide urls in English for now, then it's probably what you'll need to do until you can move to native language words in your urls. From a search engine perspective, as long as your site is setup correctly for international/multilingual, you should be fine. Google has a very helpful post here.

Then when your team can do urls in native language, you can appropriately redirect the English language-specific pages to the new urls.