Translating a .co.uk site: Yes or No?

[Juan Roman]

Wanted to hear your opinion about the following.

We have a .co.uk site that gets most traffic from the UK, but also many other countries. As it ranks also for non-English keywords, our plan is to translate the homepage, i.e. create localized pages for few more languages, obviously with proper href lang tags.

I am just worried that Google may not like adding non-English pages on a .co.uk website. Any advice on this would be welcome, especially if some of you already tried something similar.

[thesamurai]

Google automatically target co uk websites to UK market. I'll Don't do that. Reg another domain and link it to the current one with href lang.

[chaumi]

Disclaimer..I haven't done it...and this is just an educated guess...but I'd suggest that as long as you have the technical stuff right then if your non UK visitors are actually staying on/interacting with those local language versions they're landing on then Google will see them (and hence the site) favorably. If they're bouncing it may go against the site, because that's a signal something is not right (but still I think logically only that local language page would suffer).

Guesswork (as you know) and the only way to be sure is if someone has done it successfully (and remember what's worked for one site may be because of other influences, so still no absolute guarantees) ....or do a test and monitor.

But translating the home page only might be an issue. Do the non UK visitors only hit the home page? If they do, where else do they go? I'd suggest you'd need to translate all the likely destination pages.

[chaumi]

Other considerations might be...how do those non English rankings work now, without any translation. What's making them rank? And are you sure that's where the traffic is coming from? Are those non UK visitors bouncing because they're not expecting to see an English page? Or are they originally typing the query in English so expect to see an English page? etc etc

[Juan Roman]

I wouldn’t translate the homepage, but rather the main converting page as that one is getting most traffic, both for EN and non-EN search queries.

I can see in GSC that the site ranks high for some non-EN keywords, which are basically translated terms of main EN ranking keyword. Haven’t checked whether the non UK visitors are bouncing, I’ll have to do that.

[chaumi]

Got to say I have no idea how you would be ranking for non English terms when they're not even on the page, but maybe I'm just out of touch or maybe some other factor is at play. Never heard of this but will be interesting to hear if anyone else has. It kind of suggests Google is doing it's own translating and serving a result in local language, which would make no sense logically.

It's possible you'll need to understand why this is happening (if you don't already) before doing anything ...which then might help in determining how best to try and take advantage.

[Juan Roman]

Seems that Google understands that the non EN search query directly translates as the title of my site’s EN page, with only the third word being different and the base of the words being the same. So that is 2/3 words and base of 1/3 word the same in most languages, hence the non EN rankings.

[chaumi]

OK so I'm guessing you mean terms, for example, like online poker spielen (apologies to any German readers if that's a bad/incorrect example)...where the main term is globally recognized and known, but the searcher will add the part that's more often used locally. It's a bit of a trick that you're doing it though...and suggests high authority...so well done

[Juan Roman]

Yes, something like that.

I didn’t specifically target the non EN keywords, just noticed the site ranking for those. So, now looking for ways to capitalize without hurting the EN rankings.

[chaumi]

OK so I know thesamurai said don't do it...and she/he may be right.....

But if you look at it from a logical perspective....

There is no reason why a UK English speaking business wouldn't be interacting with/selling to non English speakers in other countries...so if you were Google, why wouldn't you be expecting to potentially see local language pages getting served to ensure those visitors get the best experience.

I'd say unless anyone has experience that suggests otherwise, then it's common sense to trial it. Just be careful you don't create confusion eg they hit a local language page, click to another one that's then in English. You probably need to make sure that whatever you do is consistent.

[Former Member 7]

I would say do it, but your CTR will be low from other countries as they'll see a .co.uk and ignore it. Even if you're 1st for the keyword, they would likely go to the 2nd option.

Would be better to buy yourself a .com and redirect the .co.uk to a UK version of that site, but then there would be a lot of work involved.

Definitely trial it, see how it goes - as you can always switch the domain later on with a 301. You'll not lose ranking for this, only temporarily for a week or so.

[Juan Roman]

I would say do it, but your CTR will be low from other countries as they'll see a .co.uk and ignore it. Even if you're 1st for the keyword, they would likely go to the 2nd option.

Yeah, definitely a valid point. Might not be worth it after all.