Incorporating Spanish Page/Site

[KempRugeLawGroup]

We bought an exact match domain (in Spanish) to incorporate with regular website for a particular keyword. This is our first attempt at this, and while we do have Spanish speaking staff that will translate/create a nice, quality page, we're not going to redo everything in Spanish page.

Any advice on how to implement this? Do I need to create a whole other website in Spanish? Will that be duplicate content if I do? Can I just set it up to show the first page in Spanish, but if they click on anything else it redirects to our site?

I'm pretty clueless on this, so if anything I've suggested is off-the-wall or a violation, I'm really just spit-balling, trying to figure out how to implement this.

Thanks,

Ruben

[paints-n-design]

Dont just copy and paste withoutout canonical - thats duplicate content.
I would translate as much as possible just to serve my usuall quality to spain. Why should I do less than I can? I like to do things right - not just do them...

Don't forget international SEO (hreflang a.s.o): https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo

Thats what I would do. Maybe I wouldn't have used a new domain - like to use one .. thats me, what are the others thinking?

[DirkC]

Hi Ruben,

You could translate the full site or only part of it (focussing on the most important parts). Only putting a translated homepage is an option but will not help you much in terms of SEO & isn't really great for user experience either.

You shouldn't worry about duplicate content if you translate the content to Spanish (and certainly don't put canonicals to the English version). In multilingual countries (like mine) it's more or less the standard approach. If you want to make it very obvious for Google (and the other search engines) you can use the hreflang tags. Check here for more info https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en or here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

Personally I wouldn't put the Spanish version on a brand new domain - as it implicates that you'll have to build your reputation almost from scratch - rather use a folder on your main domain (domain.com/es/ ) - this way the Spanish pages will benefit from the reputation of your current site. You could use the Spanish domain as vanity url & redirect it to the Spanish version

Would also add a link on each page - pointing to the version of that page in the other language or (if only partially translated) - to the homepage of the other language.

If you have questions let me know.

Dirk

[katemorris]

Buying the exact match domain just to rank should be treated as that only if that is what you want to do. It needs to have its own content and own marketing plan as it's a separate domain. I'd recommend one page that then pushes people to conversion, whatever that is, or to your main domain.

I think that's what you had in mind. But this is a new site totally, so it really needs the support of your own content linking to it and some marketing around it to gain links.

Don't duplicate your content and you'll be fine. See it as a microsite for that traffic in particular. Have fun with it!

[insitemoz1]

Hi Dirk, I'm having a somewhat similar issue as Ruben above.

My client has a few products he is wanting to serve for spanish customers but not his entire website. Would we just need to create a subfolder for those few products with spanish content, etc. or would we need to almost create a smaller site within the subfolder for the spanish pages?

[katemorris]

If it is just a few pages and they are only translating, you can create the pages in spanish and use hreflang to markup the English page as being in English as the Spanish in Spanish.

Instructions here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en