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“I don’t want more traffic”, said no one ever. You can’t control where you get traffic from, at least not by default.

However, if you want to get traffic from a specific country or region, there are some basics that you should nail.

By the end of this issue, you will be able to:

1. Learn how to educate Google about the local/regional pages
2. Troubleshooting mistakes while indicating alternate pages
3. Understand what to tag as variation content

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Many startup founders & solopreneurs struggle to get their pages optimized for specific regions or countries, despite having great content optimized for pain points.

Because of this, all the opportunity to get in front of the target audience in new regions is lost.

You can appeal to a larger audience by optimizing your pages for new countries/regions.

The good news is that there are fundamentals that you can incorporate in your sitemap to let Google recognize and rank for local searches.

You need to understand the concepts of local SEO & inform Google about international pages explicitly. Let me help you optimize your sitemap for local SEO and inform Google about international pages in 3 steps.

Step 1: Update your sitemap

Sitemaps is a guide for search engines with instructions on how and what to crawl on your website. You can use the sitemap to train the search engines to find alternative pages for the same content in different languages.

Here’s an example code of what indicating what it looks like to indicate localized pages to Google.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
  xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.example.com/english/page.html</loc>
    <xhtml:link
               rel="alternate"
               hreflang="de"
               href="https://www.example.de/deutsch/page.html"/>
    <xhtml:link
               rel="alternate"
               hreflang="de-ch"
               href="https://www.example.de/schweiz-deutsch/page.html"/>
    <xhtml:link
               rel="alternate"
               hreflang="en"
               href="https://www.example.com/english/page.html"/>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.example.de/deutsch/page.html</loc>
    <xhtml:link
               rel="alternate"
               hreflang="de"
               href="https://www.example.de/deutsch/page.html"/>
    <xhtml:link
               rel="alternate"
               hreflang="de-ch"
               href="https://www.example.de/schweiz-deutsch/page.html"/>
    <xhtml:link
               rel="alternate"
               hreflang="en"
               href="https://www.example.com/english/page.html"/>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.example.de/schweiz-deutsch/page.html</loc>
    <xhtml:link
               rel="alternate"
               hreflang="de"
               href="https://www.example.de/deutsch/page.html"/>
    <xhtml:link
               rel="alternate"
               hreflang="de-ch"
               href="https://www.example.de/schweiz-deutsch/page.html"/>
    <xhtml:link
               rel="alternate"
               hreflang="en"
               href="https://www.example.com/english/page.html"/>
  </url>
</urlset>

Don’t get crazy seeing this code, get professional help or replace the following elements from the code.

1. Define the relation between the URLs using <rel> attribute. In this case, it is an ‘alternate’
2. Define the language of the page in the hreflang attribute. Use ISO 639-1 format to define the language code in the hreflang attribute. For specific regions in a country, use ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format.
3. Include the URL of the alternative page in the href attribute

Notes:

1. Make sure you mention all the versions of a page as an alternative to each other. Like in the example above, English has mentioned pages for German speakers and German speakers (-de) in Switzerland (de-ch)
2. Notice the domain extension for targeting German speakers. Make sure you mention the right domain extension for the right users. Get professional help wherever required

Step 2: Understand the guidelines

Imagine ranking #1 for local searchers just by indicating Google about your local pages. Additional relevant traffic from new regions means more business opportunities. However, it’s impossible to rank for those searches if you fail to take care of basic fundamentals.

Here are a few guidelines for the sitemap indicating the localized version should be taken care of.

1. All the languages you list in the sitemap should include itself along with other languages. This will ensure, the search engine doesn’t make any assumptions
2. Include the full URL including the domain extensions. Even the protocol (https or http) should be included
3. Alternate URLs can be on different domains. By different domains, I mean different domain extensions and sub-domains.
4. To avoid other pages attributing themselves as an alternative, make sure all the alternative pages are linked to each other
5. If you expand to new countries, (doesn’t matter with domain extensions or sub-directory), make sure to link back & forth between new & old locations. That is, if you have a .in domain and now expanding to the UK with a .uk domain extension, make sure to bidirectionally link from .in to .uk.
6. Have a default page and tag the default URL under x-default value in this format: <link rel=”alternate” href=”https://example.com/” hreflang=”x-default” />

Step 3: Avoid these mistakes

It is very easy for anyone to commit a mistake while creating a sitemap, especially when internationalizing pages. Here are a few mistakes you should avoid while doing so

1. Be very careful & double-sure with hreflang values. Wrong pages may not confuse search engines because they still don’t understand unless explicitly specified. But it will be a bad UX for end users
2. Speaking of hreflang, never miss defining the default page for all the alternative URLs. For whatever reason, if the right language page isn’t served, the users won’t see a 404 or anything else
3. Don’t overuse hreflang tags and confuse search engines. These tags are only visible to search engines and are used for UX and not to manipulate search engines
4. Make sure, robots.txt doesn’t block any important URLs
5. Have a simple URL structure & it should be easy to read
6. At all costs, avoid duplicate content. There’s a difference between multi-lingual or multi-regional content and duplicate content. What’s not defined as an alternate URL is usually duplicate content. Either consolidate or remove duplicate content
7. Use canonical tags wherever required to define the original page if you have similar content
8. Check if there are no indexed pages. Use the indexing report in GSC to find all such pages

Today’s action steps →

1. Check if you have noindexed pages in GSC (GSC dashboard → Indexing report in left panel)
2. Look for similar/duplicate content and either consolidate or tag it as canonical
3. Check the robots.txt file & confirm none of the important pages are declared as noindex
4. Check the sitemap and confirm if it is up to date
5. If you need to create hreflang tags, use this tool by Aleyda Solis to generate or modify and then use this tool by Merkel SEO to validate hreflang annotations
6. Refer to this guide to learn more about managing multi-regional and multi-lingual content on your site

SEO this week

1. Google’s helpful update is turning out to be good for many publishers. Here’s everything that’s new with the new helpful update
2. How-to rich results are gone even for desktop users. Here’s the official update from Google.
3. Google search console to have a dedicated shopping tab to help ecommerce brands have Merchant Center Account
4. Amidst the SGE spree, Google’s business model is at stake, here’s what Sundar Pichai has to say on this
5. The Winners & Losers of Google’s August’23 core update

Masters of SEO

1. 6-minute process to optimize for EEAT by Andrew Holland
2. Use AI as a sidekick for content marketing efforts
3. Technical SEO: How to reduce page weight to improve UX
4. Repurpose old content like a pro to increase the life span and reach
5. Quality of content taking center stage – Google confirms quality is the most important factor

How can I help you?

I put a lot of effort into coming up with a single edition of this newsletter. I want to help you in every possible way. But I can do only so much by myself. I want you to tell me what you need help with. You can get in touch with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or email to share your thoughts & questions that you want to be addressed. I’d be more than happy to help.