In our Canadian real estate series, let’s discuss today language localization. Multilingual websites has to be optimized in terms of SEO using certain rules and recommendations; otherwise, you may lose your organic traffic due to low website optimization level.
In our SEO research dedicated to real estate market in Canada, we have analyzed more than 200 websites from the real estate listings and find out that most of them have been localized in two languages – English and French. Preparation of materials in two languages takes a lot of the resources and efforts, but the bad news is in majority of the websites from our sample the multilingual optimization is not provided correctly. For example, 172 websites do not have hreflangs, the attribute, which is used for the language specification. And while 36 websites have this attribute, only 2 of them do not have any errors detected. Did you know that even minor errors in language optimization may have negative impact on your organic traffic?
For the most major recommendations, take a look at Google Search Central article, dedicated to the topic of multilingual websites management: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/managing-multi-regional-sites
