Changing the language of the website meta title and description?

[vhubert]

Hello, Moz community! I'm planning to change the language of my website title and description from English to rank better for queries on the local language. Do you think this would increase the local language ranking? And in case I need to switch back to English, let's say in 2021, would it be difficult to regain the current rankings? Please let me know if you have any thoughts on this. Thank you!

[katemorris]

Can you tell me more? Is your target market multi-lingual? Can you expand on why you would change your title language but not the site language?

[vhubert]

Hi Kate! Usually, I target the international audience, and most of my pages are written in English. I also have pages written on the local language; they rank well but could rank better.
Due to the travel restrictions recently, I need to target the local audience. However, if the pandemic is over, I would change it again to English, which is why I wonder how much time it takes to take effect (if any) and to regain the current rankings for English searches later.
By the way, the site uses a simple engine, with no option to set up a multi-lingual mode or something like that.

[katemorris]

I'm not sure I understand. I assume you are in travel something, and usually, the English speaking audience is of more interest. Now, it is your local audience due to lack of traveling. To be clear, a title tag change can have an impact in under a week. However, the search engines retain the right to ignore your title at any time - they do it all the time with titles that they deem irrelevant.

I'd need to see the pages to be sure, but as long as they are relevant to the audience you are targeting, you should be okay in theory.

[vhubert]

Many thanks for your reply. I appreciate it. If it's approximately a week to take effect, I will experiment and give it a try. Furthermore, I've decided actually to delete the website title. : )

Since my website engine (Adobe Portfolio), for some reason, places the website title in front of the page title (according to Moz Page Optimization Score crawl), my keywords appear only in the second part of the title, instead of the beginning. This way, all my titles are also too long, since the website title is added to the lenght of the page title.

I am not sure if deleting is the right solution, but the only way to find out is to test.