Webinar: Maximizing SEO in a Multi-Lingual Setting – You Are Doing it All Wrong!

Many people are familiar with the basic tenants of international SEO, but there are some important nuances that even good SEO’s miss when approaching SEO in places where multiple languages are spoken. This webinar is critical viewing for anyone who does international SEO or anyone who does SEO for one site that operates in more than one language. It discusses the impact of the default language settings on search. They are often forgotten, but can dramatically change the search results as well as the hosted inclusions that Google chooses to insert into the top spaces in the SERP. These variations can impact the ability for your SEO ranking to drive visibility and clicks; as we know, if a search result is below a Featured Snippet, Knowledge Graph, People Also Ask, or other types of engaging Google content, it will struggle to drive traffic, even if it is towards the top. We used the MobileMoxie SERPerator tool to test Google mobile search results as if we were standing exactly in the same spot in Switzerland and change the language settings between German, French and Italian, on the exact same phone to see the differences. This testing is a stark illustration of the differences that a default language setting that a user has on their phone can have on your ability to get clicks when all other elements of the search are held constant.

In SEO, the language setting is singular, so only the default search language or phone language is used to impact rankings, even if multiple languages are set up in the profile. Most rank tracking accounts are set up with the spelling/translation of the keyword, tracked based on the language that it is in – Each keyword in a tracking group is in the language that is being tracked. The problem is that people who are multi-lingual search in multiple languages, without changing their language setting. With that in mind, it is more useful to track keywords that will be searched for in all of the most likely languages, with all of the most likely default language settings and translations – mixing them up interchangeably, in the same way, those multi-lingual searchers would search for them.

You can see why you would want to do this below. In this test, we have completed the same search from the exact same phone and same physical location – the only thing that changes is the default language setting on the phone. You can see that it changes the results quite dramatically. If you were only tracking the Italian keyword with the Italian language setting – as represented in the furthest column on the right, then if you are caffe.ch for example, you might think that you are doing a great job; BUT, if you are in a place like Switzerland (like in these search settings), where multiple languages are spoken, you can assume that there will be different language default settings, based on the individual user’s preference or default language, even though that person likely actively speaks and searches in more than one language. In that caffee.ch scenario, since German and French are more commonly spoken in Switzerland than Italian, caffee.ch is not doing quite – since most people will have a French or German default language setting. In the French default language setting, caffe.ch is only ranking once, and it is not at all with a German default language setting. You can also not the parts blocked out in gray, are Google-hosted inclusions, and these also change based on the default language setting, and also make it less likely that users will click on web results, even in top positions.

Click the video below to see the webinar. A promo code is included at the end, which can be used to sign up for 30 days of free access to the MobileMoxie tool-set, which can help you do this individual or at scale. The promo code is WEBINAR007 (WEBINAR is all capital letters, and the digits are ‘zero,’ ‘zero,’ ‘seven’ and you can just register for the free trial here. Enjoy the webinar, and please let us know what you think in the YouTube comments.