Special Characters to Open Up Hyper-Local Targeting

The internet was founded in English, but a recent update to the way that we display and read characters means that special characters are now available in URLs. This means that crawlers have a really strong signal to localised queries and businesses will be able to grow with local SEO.

Many languages have special characters within their language – think of umlauts or acute accents, as well as Chinese or Japanese characters – and this update means that certain languages can be written as they were meant to be.

What Does This Mean? 

For brands and companies that have special characters within their name or branding, this means that they no longer have to change or water it down for their internet domain. Most online activity is related to local content according to Google, so the fact that you can now search in your own language and have even more relevant results is good for business, and it is good for Google.

How Does This Help SEO and Internet Marketers?

The future of international SEO will mean ranking for local searches will become easier for the websites that used to have to rely on English characters. Local people will be able to use their local language rather than the English, and they’ll be able to better identify and engage with the online retailer or company.
This is good news for marketers because most of the world does not use English when they search, and do prefer content in their primary language. New rel-alternate-hreflang annotation for international landing pages means webmasters can specify default versions of their landing page for that country or region.

What Problems Will Come With This?

However, there are many problems for SEOs that are targeting a different locality, language or country, that come with translating or writing in a language you do not know. Copy on a site might be in the right language, but if it doesn’t read well then it simply won’t work for the user. This is why you need a copywriter who speaks the target language fluently.

Keyword research may also be a problem as the key words or phrases will be completely lost in a straight translation. Different languages have different thought processes that go with them, so the local people will search in a different way. A copywriter or analyst who has spoken the language for a very long time, or one whose first language is the target language will be able to understand the thought processes better that anyone else.

You should also take into consideration the fact that Google may not be the dominant search engine in the country that you are targeting. Russia, China and many others have their own search engines that wash out Google almost entirely. Complying with the rules and algorithms of the dominant search engine is imperative to rank in the SERPs in these countries.