Translated the site but traffic is not coming

[Heydarian]

Hi,

We've build a lawyer directory website (www.iranianlawyers.com) which already has good Google rankings for related terms (Ex. Iranian lawyers, Iranian lawyers california, etc). About 1.5 months ago we translated the site to Farsi and published it online: www.iranianlawyers.com/farsi

However we have yet to see any new traffic generated from those pages. The website has a decent back-link profile and there are no almost no competitors in our space with translated pages. Would someone please take a look at our translated pages and let me know if there are any major on-site issues that you see that we need to address? I've checked for noindex or nofollow tags but they dont seem to be an issue. Not sure if I'm missing something here.

Thank you very much

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Well, your website is indexed - site:www.iranianlawyers.com/farsi bunch of pages come up. However, there is no way to tell that no traffic correlates to translation. It's a lot of branding, rankings, demand and so on. I would say that you need to have a technical SEO audit done, probably with full SEO audit.

[CleverPhD]

If I am reading your pages correctly, /farsi is the exact same page as your home page, just translated into Farsi.

Here are some things to think about.

1. you have no explicit declaration of what language is on this page in your markup. Google can probably figure it out, but you should mark it explicitly. When I brought up your page in Chrome, Chrome listed that the page was in Persian. It may be that persian is the same as farsi (I dont know) but, little details around being very explicit with the language designation can help.

2. If the /farsi section of your website is an exact translation of the English version of the website, you need to use the hreflang to explain this to Google.  Google may not be 100% sure of the relationships of the two sets of pages.  They are "duplicates" with the difference being in the type of language and so you want to make sure that Google understands the type of duplication so it knows what to do with it.

3. Are you hoping that persons in the US will be searching in farsi on Google to find your site? Are you hoping that someone in Iran will search for key terms in farsi and Google will show your farsi pages? You need to add some markup to also show what countries you are targeting with each section, depending on your keyword goals.  Just to add to what Dimitri posted, I would say a technical SEO audit with someone who understand international markup.

[gfiorelli1]

Farsi is Persian

Then, and this is for CleverPHD, the hreflang, albeit suggested, is not strictly needed because Google is quite good in understanding that they are two different languages. Moreover: Google stated tons of times that translated content is not duplicate content.

I agree on geotargeting, if you mean to target a specific geo-located audience.

You can do that also for subfolder creating a Google Search Console property for the /farsi subfolder and geo-targeting it in the "Internationalization" section. However, I don't think you are desiring to geo-target to USA, because your lawyers are from all the globe. Am I right thinking, then, that your main country target for the farsi version could be Iran itself, so to offer iranian lawyers abroad for Iranian countries, which want to open its business also thanks to the quite recent end of the blockage?

Finally, I tend to agree with Dimitri...

if the target are the farsi speaking people resident in the USA, probably there is not that much search volume in farsi for your niche, even though and accordingly to the 2,011 census about 400,000 people speak it.

On the other hand, if you're targeting Iran, I would also consider the possibility that the Iranian Internet Laws are somehow limiting the visibility of your /farsi subfolder in Google.

Finally, I didn't check out the technical SEO and On Page SEO state of your site, but I would also check them in order to see or discard any other potential issue.

[gfiorelli1]

Check out my answer to Nima, because in the beginning I also refute one thing you say about translations and duplicate content.

[CleverPhD]

Thanks for the comments Gianluca, I am not as up on international stuff and so appreciate the input.

[Heydarian]

Thank you all very much. Yes, Farsi is Persian.

CleverPhD, I'm definitely going to add the markups you suggested.

Gianluca, I'm not targeting Iran with the Farsi translations - that is definitely a second goal. I'm targeting Iranians around the world who search on Google in Farsi. Or simply Iranians who land on the site because our offline marketing but they prefer a Farsi website because their English is not very good.

The language markup and the hreflang markup seem basic and easy enough to implement. I also found a bunch of wrong URLs in our sitemap that might have caused some duplicate content issues. I've ran the on-page SEO tool here on Moz too. Moz bot doesn't seem to be able read Farsi but it doens't give me any accessibility issues.

Again, thank you for your replies.