Improve global rankings with hreflang

One of the biggest challenges of international SEO is successfully targeting the right content to the correct region. It is important that you provide global visitors with the correct country/language version of your website, as this is key to converting them from a visitor to a customer. Google offers the use of hreflang-x annotations to mark up equivalent webpages targeting different regions or languages. Using hreflang-x ensures that the correct country/language version of your website appears to global users, thereby helping to reduce bounce rates, increase conversions and improve regional rankings. We will review the implementation of hreflang-x on your website, report on any problems we identify and provide recommendations for improvement.

A hreflang check can help...

When you want to ensure that your global users are being presented with the right country/language version of your website.

When you want to ensure the good SEO performance of your global webpages.

When you want to ensure that your global webpages see low bounce rates and high conversions.

When your website is targeting different countries using hreflang-x.

When you have identified issues with your website’s implementation of hreflang-x.

When you need to review your website’s current implementation of hreflang-x.

Success story: How we implemented hreflang to improve local rankings on Google

What our clients say

Flexible and innovative approaches to meet demanding goals

Webcertain has been a valued partner of Portakabin for over 20 years, providing the expertise required to help us grow our business in multiple European markets. With a wide-portfolio of websites and products, as well numerous internal stakeholders, we require flexible and innovative approaches to enable us to meet the demanding goals of each business unit. Webcertain understands our needs and our brand, and this enables the team to deliver cost-effective, adaptable solutions across SEO, PPC and website development which have played a vital role in our international growth and success.

Evelyn Hodgson

Head of Brand - Portakabin

Adapted for each market for maximum impact

We work with Webcertain to increase our brand awareness across key European markets and help us drive brand growth. Together, we have created campaigns utilising multiple channels and adapted for each target market to ensure maximum impact and relevancy to our audience. Webcertain has a great support team, who are easy to reach and very helpful in providing information. They understand our needs and provide a flexible approach that enables us to meet our goals

Hazel Goesaert

European Associate Marketing Manager - Business Machines - Fellowes

Technical and strategic expertise

Webcertain's understanding of language nuance and local culture ensures our messaging is relevant and compelling in each market we target, while staying true to our brand and highlighting our USPs. We rely on their technical and strategic expertise to develop both organic and paid search campaigns which will resonate with our audience and drive results across Europe. The team understands our goals and is proactive in making recommendations for improvements and suggesting opportunities. We are very happy with the results and would recommend Webcertain as an ideal partner for any brand with a global reach.

Surpreet Bahl

Digital Marketing Manager - Esko

For international support, look no further than Webcertain

There are many challenges when running international campaigns and Webcertain has provided invaluable support to us when targeting countries as diverse as China, Japan and Russia, where both cultural and linguistic knowledge are paramount for success. This knowledge, combined with skills and expertise across all digital channels, enabled us to build tailored and targeted campaigns to inform and attract students from around the globe. If you're looking for SEO, SEM or translation support in multiple languages and countries, look no further than Webcertain.

Tim Jordan

VP Marketing Berlitz and ELS

What is hreflang?

One of the biggest challenges of international SEO is successfully targeting the right content to the correct region, so that searchers from a particular region are presented with content that is aimed at them. In December 2011, Google introduced a useful solution that can improve regional rankings by offering the use of rel="alternate" hreflang="x" annotations to mark up equivalent webpages targeting different regions or languages. As well as improving rankings, implementing hreflang-x can also help to reduce bounce rates and improve conversions.

Implementing hreflang-x either in HTML or XML format in theory isn't difficult, however, a significant portion of hreflang-x implementations nowadays are still incorrect. Common problems involve incorrect values for the hreflang-x attribute, broken or incorrect references, invalid use of hreflang-x-default and more. If there are problems with a hreflang-x implementation, Google is likely to ignore all included annotations.

Deploying hreflang-x can be a time-consuming task, especially for larger websites with many regional versions. Removing issues and making it error-free will ensure that the effort put into the deployment is producing the desired results. We will review the implementation of hreflang-x on your website, report on errors found and provide recommendations to fix them.

How does a hreflang check work?

The process begins by completing a briefing questionnaire in which you will be asked to provide the base URL of each regional website along with its target language and region. If hreflang-x has been implemented in XML sitemaps, you will be asked to provide URLs for the sitemap locations.

For HTML deployments, your website will be crawled, hreflang-x annotations obtained from webpages and then reviewed.

If hreflang-x was deployed in XML sitemaps, we will review the annotations included in the sitemaps. In this review we will check if syntax, attribute values and code are correct, self-referencing and bi-directional referencing are in place, if there are any broken hreflang-x links as well as any other problems that are identified.

The review will report all problems found and our recommendations on how they should be fixed.

Webcertain Group is passionate about generating business growth for its clients in any part of the world.

A team of native speakers of all the world’s major languages works together to achieve client objectives - no one understands working with different cultures and the nuances of language in the globe’s search engines better than the Webcertain multilingual teams. Webcertain operates in 44 languages.

Benefits of working with Webcertain:

International specialist since 1997

Transparency and online portal management

No minimum contract period

No minimum order value

International know-how shared

Quick response times

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