A technical SEO audit is essential for ensuring your multilingual website is appropriately optimized for search engines and delivers a seamless user experience across all languages and regions. Multilingual websites face unique challenges, such as language targeting, regional indexing, and content duplication issues. A thorough technical SEO audit helps you identify and fix these problems, improving your site’s search visibility and performance in different markets.

In this article, we’ll explore the key steps to conducting a technical SEO audit for multilingual websites, including checking for hreflang implementation, optimizing site architecture, and ensuring proper indexing and crawling for all language versions.

Why a Technical SEO Audit is Crucial for Multilingual Websites

A technical SEO audit helps you:

• Identify Language-Specific SEO Issues: Multilingual websites often face challenges with language targeting, regional indexing, and content duplication. An audit helps you detect and fix these issues.
• Improve Site Performance Across Regions: By auditing your site’s technical elements, you ensure that users in all regions have a fast and seamless experience, which can improve engagement and rankings.
• Optimize for Global Search Engines: Different search engines prioritize different ranking factors, so auditing your site for technical issues ensures that it meets the requirements of search engines like Google, Baidu, and Yandex.

Key Steps for Conducting a Technical SEO Audit for Multilingual Websites

1. Check Hreflang Implementation

Hreflang tags are essential for multilingual websites because they tell search engines which language and regional version of a page to display to users. Incorrect hreflang implementation can lead to indexing issues, duplicate content problems, and poor rankings in regional search results.

Best Practices for Checking Hreflang Tags:

• Ensure Correct Language and Region Codes: Verify that your hreflang tags use the correct ISO language and region codes. For example, hreflang="en-us" should be used for English content targeting users in the United States, while hreflang="es-es" should be used for Spanish content targeting Spain.
• Test for Proper Cross-Linking: Each language version of your content should reference the other language versions in its hreflang tags. For example, the French version of a page should link to the English, Spanish, and other language versions using hreflang tags, and vice versa.
• Use Canonical Tags in Combination: Ensure that hreflang tags are used alongside canonical tags to prevent duplicate content issues. Canonical tags should point to the main version of each page, while hreflang tags indicate the regional versions.

You can use tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, or SEMrush to audit your hreflang implementation and fix any errors or inconsistencies.

2. Ensure Proper Indexing and Crawling

One of the most important steps in a technical SEO audit is to ensure that all language versions of your site are properly indexed and crawled by search engines. If search engines cannot index or crawl your content correctly, your site may not appear in search results for users in different regions.

Best Practices for Indexing and Crawling:

• Submit Sitemaps for Each Language Version: Create and submit a separate XML sitemap for each language version of your website to ensure that search engines can find and index all of your content. You can submit these sitemaps through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Check for Crawl Errors: Use Google Search Console to check for crawl errors, such as pages that return a 404 error or that are blocked by your robots.txt file. Make sure that these issues are resolved for all language versions of your site.
• Use the Correct HTTP Status Codes: Ensure that your pages return the correct HTTP status codes. For example, pages that no longer exist should return a 404 status code, while pages that have been permanently redirected should return a 301 status code. This helps search engines understand the structure of your site and index it properly.

Proper indexing and crawling are essential for ensuring that all language versions of your site appear in search results and are accessible to users in different regions.

3. Optimize Site Architecture for Multilingual SEO

A well-organized site architecture helps search engines understand the structure of your website and improves the user experience. For multilingual websites, it’s important to ensure that your site architecture is optimized for language targeting and that it allows users to easily navigate between language versions.

Best Practices for Optimizing Site Architecture:

• Use a Consistent URL Structure: Choose a consistent URL structure for all language versions of your site. You can use subdirectories (e.g., example.com/en/, example.com/fr/) or subdomains (e.g., en.example.com, fr.example.com) to separate different languages.
• Link Between Language Versions: Include links between the language versions of your pages to help users switch between languages easily. This also helps search engines understand the relationships between the different versions of your content.
• Ensure Proper Navigation: Make sure that your website’s navigation is intuitive and that users can easily find the language version they’re looking for. Include a language switcher in a prominent location, such as in the header or navigation menu.

Optimizing your site architecture for multilingual SEO ensures that search engines can understand your content and that users can easily navigate between different language versions.

4. Check for Duplicate Content Across Languages

Duplicate content can be a major issue for multilingual websites, especially if the same content appears in multiple languages without proper language targeting. Search engines may see this as duplicate content, which can negatively impact your rankings.

Best Practices for Avoiding Duplicate Content:

• Use Canonical Tags: Use canonical tags to indicate the primary version of a page and avoid duplicate content issues. Each language version should have its own canonical tag pointing to the correct URL for that language.
• Implement Hreflang Tags: As mentioned earlier, hreflang tags help search engines understand that different language versions of a page are intended for different regions, preventing duplicate content penalties.
• Avoid Automatic Translation: Avoid using automatic translation tools that create low-quality, duplicated content across languages. Instead, invest in professional localization to ensure that your content is unique and optimized for each region.

By checking for and resolving duplicate content issues, you can prevent search engines from penalizing your site and improve your rankings across all language versions.

5. Audit Page Speed and Mobile Optimization

Page speed and mobile optimization are critical ranking factors for search engines, especially for users in different regions where internet speeds may vary. A slow-loading website can lead to higher bounce rates and lower rankings, so it’s essential to ensure that your multilingual website is optimized for both desktop and mobile devices.

Best Practices for Page Speed and Mobile Optimization:

• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN stores copies of your website on servers around the world, reducing latency and speeding up content delivery to users in different regions.
• Optimize Images and Media: Compress images and media files to reduce their size without sacrificing quality. Use next-gen formats like WebP to ensure fast loading times.
• Minimize HTTP Requests: Reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining CSS and JavaScript files and minimizing redirects.
• Ensure Mobile-Friendly Design: Use responsive web design to ensure that your website looks and functions well on mobile devices. Regularly test your site’s mobile performance using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

By auditing your site’s page speed and mobile optimization, you can improve user experience, reduce bounce rates, and boost your rankings in mobile search results across different regions.

6. Monitor and Resolve Broken Links

Broken links can harm your site’s user experience and SEO performance by leading users to dead-end pages. For multilingual websites, it’s important to ensure that all internal and external links work correctly across all language versions.

Best Practices for Monitoring Broken Links:

• Use a Crawling Tool: Use a crawling tool like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to identify broken links on your website. This tool will provide a list of URLs that return a 404 error or that lead to non-existent pages.
• Fix or Redirect Broken Links: Fix broken links by updating the URL or redirecting them to a relevant page using a 301 redirect. Make sure that redirects are in place for all language versions of your site.

By regularly monitoring and resolving broken links, you can improve your site’s user experience and ensure that search engines can crawl and index all of your content.

Case Study: Conducting a Technical SEO Audit for a Multilingual E-Commerce Website

A global e-commerce company with websites in English, French, and German wanted to improve its search engine rankings and performance across all regions. The company conducted a thorough technical SEO audit to identify and resolve issues that were affecting its multilingual site.

Key Actions Taken:

• Audited Hreflang Implementation: The company found that its hreflang tags were not properly implemented, leading to duplicate content issues. After fixing the hreflang tags, the company saw an improvement in regional search rankings.
• Fixed Indexing and Crawling Issues: The audit revealed that several pages on the French and German versions of the site were not being indexed by search engines due to incorrect settings in the robots.txt file. After resolving these issues, the company’s international traffic increased by 20%.
• Optimized Page Speed and Mobile Performance: The company improved page load times by compressing images, using a CDN, and minimizing HTTP requests. These optimizations resulted in a 30% increase in mobile traffic and better rankings in mobile search results.

By conducting a technical SEO audit, the company was able to improve its multilingual website’s performance and increase its visibility in international search results.

Conclusion

Conducting a technical SEO audit for a multilingual website is essential for ensuring that all language versions of your site are properly optimized for search engines and provide a seamless user experience. By auditing hreflang tags, indexing and crawling, site architecture, and other technical elements, you can identify and fix issues that may be affecting your site’s performance in different regions.

For businesses looking to optimize their multilingual websites, Web Zodiac’s SEO Services offer expert solutions for technical SEO audits, including white-label SEO services and enterprise SEO services. By following these best practices, you can ensure that your multilingual website ranks well in global search results and provides a great user experience across all markets.