Impact of Non-English target keywords in URL

[diki]

Hi all, our site language is Farsi (Persian) so at first we tried to create URLs that contain our target keywords in Farsi too. The problem with this approach is that our URLs are not shown in a friendly style anymore: a bunch of unicode numeric codes instead of Farsi characters. Do you know which is the best approach? 1. Creating ugly looking URLs containing Farsi keywords 2. Forget about putting our keywords in URLs and have nice English URLs Thanks in advance for your time and help

[Theo-NL]

This depends on quite some factors, most importantly if this is a local site targeting only the Farsi language or it is an international site written in Farsi?

If this site is local, then having Farsi keywords in your URL (which should be displayed properly in most modern browsers these days if I recall correctly) might boost both your CTR from the SERPs and possibly even your rankings (though I must admit this is just a hunch and I don't have any data to support the ranking hypothesis).

On the other hand if the site is international, I would certainly go for the English URLs. Using them would enable a vastly greater amount of people to be able to actually read and understand the keywords in the URL, causing for example a higher CTR from the SERPs. Even if your site is local, but occasionally has international visitors, I would probably still go for the English characters to help both search engines and human visitors understand the contents of that page better.

[diki]

Hi Theo, thanks for reply. The site is for local business and handling unicode URLs by browsers is not problem.

The problem is when we want to share the URL somewhere (in a directory service) it looks like very ugly! Also since I couldn't find any URL shortener that support non-english characters for customization then our URLs for tweet can't have keywords too.

What is your opinion? Keep up with Farsi characters in URL?

Thanks

[Theo-NL]

Given the current state of the Internet (with the shorteners you've mentioned, etc) I would suggest to use English characters so a maximum amount of people can read the URL.