If your target audience speaks different languages, offering your website content in multiple languages would make sense to provide a better user experience.
But does offering different languages on your website affect organic search rankings?
Can the way you organize your localized pages affect organic search rankings?
The Claim: Language As A Ranking Factor
Your content should be in English if you want to reach English-speaking people.
However, that same English content probably won’t rank well in markets where other languages – including Chinese, Arabic, or Spanish, for instance – dominate.
Businesses that want to reach customers who speak different languages in specific countries can do so by creating content in multiple languages.
So, it seems logical that language plays some role in how Google ranks webpages, right?
Search engines will always do their best to present users with the most relevant results, and they can detect the language in the content. But they also seem to want us to help by organizing localized versions of pages.
If a searcher sets English as their preferred language and Canada as their location, Google will consider those preferences when delivering results. It makes sense that websites targeting English-speaking people in Canada could be more likely to appear in that search.
The Evidence For Language As A Ranking Factor
Google’s Advanced SEO documentation shares how you can tell Google about localized versions of your page. The reason this is important?
Google recommends using different URLs for different language versions of a page. Then, mark each URL with the language you’re using to help search engines understand what’s going on. You can organize language-specific pages in a few different ways:
HTML Tags
The first option is to use the hreflang attribute in the HTML tags of a page, which tells search engines the target language and country for the page.
HTTP Headers
You can also place hreflang tags in an HTTP header. This use case helps indicate the language of non-HTML files.
Sitemaps
You can also use your sitemap to specify a page’s language and region variants. This involves listing each language-specific URL under a <loc> tag. Follow the link above to see Google’s guide and code snippet examples.
Different Domains For Different Countries
You can use top-level domain names for specific countries for an Italian website, such as https://domain.it/, which tells search engines the entire website targets people in Italy.
Language-Specific Subdirectories
In addition, you can use subdirectories to separate content by language and country. An example would be content found under https://domain.com/en-us/, targeting English-speaking people in the United States.
It’s important to note that Google claims it doesn’t use any of these methods to determine the language or target audience: