Multilingual SEO services are designed to help companies that are targeting an international audience, to surface better in local search engines, but not only. As you know, 3 languages are spoken in Hong Kong (Cantonese, English and Mandarin) and Google Hong Kong offers 3 versions of its search engine.
If you want to reach all of the Hong Kong users, you might want to have different versions for each languages and Get Clicks can help you.
Several search engines propose language versions. It happens in various countries like Hong Kong, where Google proposes three languages as well as in Google Belgium or in Google Spain. If a country has several official languages, search engines will offer languages based experiences and search results will be different. For instance, if a Hong Kong user searches for “SEO” in Google Hong Kong in English and in Google Hong Kong in Cantonese, search results won’t be the same. While it’s impossible to know how many people are using Google Hong Kong in English compared to the Cantonese version, if you want to target 100% of your target, you might want to propose language based pages.
If your business proposes country based offers, multilingual SEO will also be an asset. For instance, if you have an online store which targets the US and the UK market, with similar content, you might want to be sure that the right pages will be indexed in the right local versions of the search engines that you target. In the meantime, if you have product pages in the same language, but not dedicated to the same location, setting up the multilingual SEO properly will help you to avoid duplicate content that might prevent your website to perform well in search results.
Note that the international SEO strategy is not limited to websites that offer similar content in the same language. If you have the same offer for Hong Kong and for France, multilingual SEO will also help you to perform better for each search engine.
If you want to target various languages or countries, your website must follow international SEO best-practices. While some changes are purely source-code related, other improvements that might impact the user-experience can be required.
Get Clicks worked on various multilingual websites, both in Hong Kong and in France including Lane Crawford, Euro CRM, Citroën or Nature Asia.
The first step is to propose a URL structure that follows multilingual SEO best-practices. Either you need to have a sub-folder that will target the country or the language (eg. https://www.site.com/en/), or a sub-domain (eg. https://en.site.com/) or a CCTLD, which stand for Country-Code Top Level Domain (eg. https://www.site.co.uk).
Hreflang Tags help search engines to understand the language and/or the country that each one of your pages target. There is a need to do a mapping of the corresponding pages to make sure that the tags are properly implemented in the source-code. Implementing these tags will help search engine to index the right pages in the right local versions.
Creating internal links between the corresponding pages available for different languages or location is also a good practice. Most of the time, these pages are linked in the header or the footer using a flag. This will help search engines to understand the site's structure as well as to improve your internal link strategy, which will be a benefit for your rankings as well.
If you mix different languages in a single page, it can mislead search engine about the language or the location that the page targets. A page that mixes English and Cantonese will hardly perform in search engines. A common best-practice is to make sure that there is only a single language per page and to use an international-friendly URL structure.
Working on your international and multilingual SEO strategy is a way for you to increase your organic reach and revenues :
Get Clicks is a Hong Kong based SEO company and is able to manage project in various languages, including, English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, French and Spanish.
No, this is not advised. For instance, if you have a page that mixes English, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Google will be confused about the audience that you target. As a consequence, your page might not rank well.
There are three solutions that you can use to structure your domain for international SEO purposes and each one of them has pros and cons: