Lidia Infante asked Google's John Mueller an excellent question on international SEO. She asked why do you think each country and language site needs a different approach to success in SEO? Is it about Google's understanding of languages or more about user behavior changes with search?
Here is her question "In my experience, each country/language needs a different approach to succeed in SEO. Is it because Google's semantic understanding changes, because the search landscape is different or because the users behave differently?"
John Mueller said it is likely both but he would give more weight to the user side. He said "I think it's a bit of both, but probably mostly users. The quality of natural language understanding varies across languages, but more than that, users have very different expectations & queries - they don't just translate an English search term into their language and use that."
Here are those posts on Twitter:
I think it's a bit of both, but probably mostly users. The quality of natural language understanding varies across languages, but more than that, users have very different expectations & queries - they don't just translate an English search term into their language and use that.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 26, 2021
How does Google know if users like the language you use on your international versions of your website without looking at user engagement signals? I guess Google looks at the language?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
