International SEO strategy for an ecommerce with 3 languages.

[footd]

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.

[DirkC]

Hi,

I would personally use domain.com/language for all the sites and use the root to propose the choice of language like this example http://www.volvocars.com/ (which to me seems to be a more future proof solution) if you want to extend your website to other languages or specifically target other regions (example Mexico- which is also Spanish speaking).

1: fully agree - it's much better to translate the url's

2: hreflang - seems ok. You can always check the implementation on http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/ to see if the implementation is ok and/or use this hreflang generator http://www.internationalseomap.com/hreflang-tags-generator/ to create the code.

For the default version - up to you but I would rather go for English as it's more a universal language than Spanish.

3. Geotargeting is not in contradiction to the hreflang tag for the exemple you give - it would have been if you would have set the language to Chinese & geotargeting to France.

4. The language tag you mention doesn't seem to be correct - see also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4417923/html-meta-tag-for-content-language - rather use  for Spanish,  for French,.. (you could check the specs on this as well: http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-language-declarations

5. You can use self-referencing canonicals - it's however not necessary to use the canonical to set your preferred version (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html)

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[footd]

Hi Dirk,

Thanks for the prompt response!

Actually I thought about the expansion, but I didn't see problem with that structure. If tomorrow I want to target mexico I guess I'd create a subdirectory for them with a spanish version for them, since their spanish have peculiarities. Moreover, with the current hreflang, mexican people querying in spanish would be covered. Anyway, I agree with you, your proposal is clearer. I just wanted to know if I could save tons of 301s (and risk) in the most important version of my web.

2- Thanks for the tools!

3- With in contradiction ,I mean with the fact that I target language in hreflang but country in Google Webmaster Tools.

4- Sure, thanks.

5- Clear now.

Best regards.

[gfiorelli1]

Overall a good answer, but I disagree on point 3 in this specific case.

In fact, if Diego is interested only in targeting French users and not - for instance - users from Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria et al), then the hreflang should be consistent with the geo-targeting it is doing on Search Console, hence the hreflang should be "FR-fr" (only French speaking people in France).

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Hi Gianluca,

Thanks for your response! I've read some of your responses about International SEO and they helped me a lot. Actually the idea about keeping my default store without language code came from one of them, I think.

With regards point 3, yes I want to target french people in france, not only because of the language, but the messages about shipping costs, delivery time, ... are related to them too. I understand that someone from belgium will be affected and will view the page in english.

Best regards.

[gfiorelli1]

In that case you can eventually rely on IP detection, and if someone from Belgium is entering on your site, then you can fire an alert, somehow as Amazon does:

"We detected that you are visiting us from Belgium, so we suggest you to visit the French version of our web site".

This, though, does not solve the problem of Belgians speaking Flemish