Recherche avancée

Sur d’autres sites (3023)

• How to Check Website Traffic : A Complete Guide

  26 février, par Daniel Crough — Analytics Tips, Marketing

  If you want to learn about the health of your website and the success of your digital marketing initiatives, there are few better ways than checking your website traffic.

  Checking website traffic is a great way to get a dopamine hit when things are up. And it’s a great way to troubleshoot problems when things go down. It’s also a critical data source for marketing and web teams. But to get the most out of it, you need reliable data sources, the ability to track them over time and a way to monitor the competition.

  This article explains how to check website traffic (for your site and your competitors), explores nine tools that can help and discusses why some methods are better than others.

  Why check website traffic ?

  Dopamine hits aside, monitoring website traffic is crucial to a business — even for a primarily brick-and-mortar operation. In this internet age, customers and prospects are far more likely to research a company online before buying anything.

  SOCi’s 2024 Consumer Behavior Index found that 8 in 10 US consumers use the internet to search for local businesses at least once a week. And Statista found that 55% of UK shoppers always do some online research before making a major purchase.

  And trend lines suggest these numbers are likely to continue climbing. Businesses need to know what’s happening on their sites, and that’s difficult to achieve without traffic data.

  Indeed, website data allows companies to better understand their target audiences, measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts and channels, and identify areas of the website that need work.

  Let’s dig into those ideas in a little more detail.

  

  Benchmark site performance

  Keeping regular tabs on traffic levels is a great way to track a website’s performance over time. It can help with planning for the future and identifying current problems.

  For instance, rising traffic levels may mean expanding the business’s offering or investing in more inventory. On the flip side, decreasing traffic levels may suggest it’s time to revamp marketing strategies or look into issues impacting SEO.

  Analyse user behaviour

  Checking website traffic, user behaviour, and other metrics shows marketing managers how users interact with the website. These traffic stats can help answer questions like :

  • Which pages are users visiting ?
  • Which CTAs are they clicking on ?
  • Which page elements encourage users to take the desired actions ?

  It can also identify issues contributing to high bounce rates or declines in search rankings.

  The better user behaviour is understood, the easier it is to give visitors what they want. For example, the data could reveal that users spend more time on landing pages than blogs. These valuable insights can be used to optimise blog content and improve performance.

  Improve the user experience

  Once user behaviour is well understood, it’s easier to make adjustments, update content and improve the overall user experience. This also allows companies to create more personalised customer experiences, which can lead to growth. Research shows companies that get personalisation right generate 40% more revenue from those activities than average players.

  That could take the form of sweeping changes like rearranging a website’s navigation bar based on user behaviour. It could also be personalisation that uses analytics to transform sections or entire pages based on individual user behaviour.

  Optimise digital marketing strategies

  Knowing current traffic levels and how they trend over time helps teams set benchmarks and prioritise marketing efforts.

  Monthly traffic reports can inform SEO efforts and benefit marketing attribution. For example, they could indicate when the time is right to double down on organic traffic or when the better strategy would be to invest more in PPC advertising.

  Increasing organic traffic levels from other countries can help businesses identify new marketing opportunities. If traffic levels from a neighbouring country or a growing market increase significantly, it could be time for a cross-border campaign.

  Filter unwanted traffic

  A significant chunk of every website’s traffic comes from bots and other unwanted sources. This can compromise the quality of website data and make it harder to draw useful insights. While it’s nearly impossible to get rid of this traffic completely, many analytics tools have features to filter it out of the stats.

  Why check competitors’ website traffic

  Websites are windows into businesses and their strategies. That’s why monitoring traffic and other metrics drawn from competitors is essential.

  There’s a lot to learn from the competition, both good and bad. What competitors do well can be replicated, and learning from the elements they get wrong can help you avoid making the same mistakes.

  • Strategic planning : Looking at traffic on specific pages can offer insight into potential marketing campaigns and highlight gaps in the market that may be worth attacking. Looking at their organic, paid, social and referral traffic levels can highlight opportunities for growth or pinpoint the reasons for success in a particular area.
  • Benchmarking : Looking at website traffic in isolation can lack context. Monitoring other sites’ engagement metrics, like bounce rate and average session duration, can give you an inside look at the competition, which can help you set realistic performance goals and benchmarks.
  • Product Development : Significant traffic volume on certain pages can indicate shifts in demand and market trends, which may inform the development of new products or services. For example, if a competitive dog food supplier ranks well for the term “organic dog food”, that might be something to consider when formulating new products.
  • Audience demographics : Comparing audience demographics between competitors can highlight opportunities and help a business narrow down its target audience. This guides messaging and campaign strategies to capture specific audience segments.
  • Keyword opportunities : Examining the keywords driving the most traffic to a competitor’s website can help you uncover untapped SEO potential for your website. Analysing top-performing content on competing sites can help identify content improvement strategies to pull traffic away from competitors.
  • Partnerships : Referrals are an often overlooked traffic metric. High volumes of such traffic indicate successful partnerships between competitors and third parties, which is a model worth emulating.

  7 key website traffic metrics to track

  Traffic metrics are not a case of one-size-fits-all. Those that are important today may not be tomorrow. It all depends on the priorities and goals at any one moment. That said, there are a few traffic metrics that always matter to some degree.

  • New visitors : These are users who have never visited the website before. They are a great sign that marketing efforts are working and the website is reaching more people. But it’s also important to track how they behave on the website to ensure the site caters effectively to the needs of new visitors.
  • Returning visitors : Returning visitors are coming back to the website for a reason : either they like the content they find or want to buy something. Either way, it’s excellent news. The more returning visitors, the better.
  • Bounce rate : This measures how many users leave the website without taking action. Different analytics tools measure this metric differently.
  • Session duration : This is the time users spend on the website, which can reveal whether they find the site engaging. And when considered alongside the next metric, it can be especially insightful.
  • Pages per session : This measures the average number of pages users visit on a website. The more pages they visit and the longer users spend on the website, the more engaging it is.
  • Traffic source : Traffic can come from various sources (organic, direct, social media, referral, etc.). Knowing the highest sources of referral traffic can help analyse and prioritise marketing efforts.
  • User demographics : This shows who visits a website, what device they use, what country they come from, etc. While most website traffic will come from the countries targeted by marketing, an influx of new users from other countries can open the door to new opportunities.

  9 tools to check website traffic

  There are thousands of different web analytics tools that can provide decent website traffic analysis and functionality checks. They all use a similar combination of sophisticated algorithms, data collection techniques, statistical analysis and machine learning to deliver insights into visitor behaviour and site performance.

  Most web analytics tools work by embedding bits of JavaScript or other tracking codes into a website. When users land on a website, it gathers data such as page views, session duration, and specific interactions. Many also use cookies to identify returning visitors, which lets them monitor user behaviour over time.

  Many tools offer advanced event-tracking functionality. This captures specific actions, like clicks or form submissions, and provides a more granular view of engagement. The data is then statistically analysed to spot trends and calculate key metrics like bounce rates and conversion rates.

  Some web analytics tools use machine learning to predict future user behaviour based on historical patterns. Others aggregate data to provide insights via charts comparing website performance with selected competitors’ websites.

  This section explores nine popular tools for checking website traffic and highlights their unique features and benefits.

  1. Checking website traffic with Google Analytics

  Google Analytics is usually the first place to start for anyone looking to check their website traffic. It’s free to use, incredibly popular and offers a wide range of traffic reports.

  It breaks down historical traffic data in many different ways. It can split traffic by acquisition channel (organic, social media, direct, etc.), by country, device or demographic. It also provides real-time traffic reports that offer a snapshot of users on the site right now and over the last 30 minutes.

  

  Google Analytics may be one of the most popular ways to check website traffic, but it could be better. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is difficult to use compared to its predecessor, and it also imposes data tracking limits in accordance with privacy laws. If users refuse cookie consent, Google Analytics won’t record those visits. In other words, using Google Analytics alone doesn’t provide a complete view of the traffic.

  

  Also, GA4 relies on sampling when processing large datasets or complex queries. When the volume of data exceeds certain thresholds, it only considers a subset of the data to generate reports instead of processing every single data point.

  There are pros and cons to this approach. While it speeds up analysis and reduces the load on the system, it can also lead to inaccuracies in insights delivered. When analysing traffic patterns over a busy period, GA4 may only use a portion of the data to calculate and then extrapolate metrics.

  As a result, trends or anomalies might be overlooked or misconstrued, which could mean missed opportunities or poor decisions. That’s why it’s important to use Google Analytics alongside other web analytics tools (like Matomo) that don’t suffer from the same privacy issues. That way, it’s possible to track every single user who visits the website.

  2. Checking website traffic with Google Search Console

  Google Search Console is a free tool that analyses a website’s Google search traffic. The top-line report shows how many times the website has appeared in Google Search, how many clicks it has received, the average clickthrough rate and its average position in the search results.

  

  It’s a great way to understand what the website ranks for and how much traffic organic rankings generate. It will also show which pages are indexed in Google and whether there are any crawling errors.

  Unfortunately, Google Search Console is limited if a complete view of traffic is needed. While the search traffic can be analysed in great detail, it will not report how users who access the website behave on it.

  3. Checking website traffic with Similarweb

  Similarweb is a website analysis tool that estimates the total traffic of any site on the internet. It is one of the best traffic checker tools for estimating how much web traffic competitors receive.

  What’s great about Similarweb is that it estimates total traffic, not just traffic from search engines like many SEO tools. It even breaks down traffic by different channels for easy comparison.

  

  Similarweb provides an estimate of total visits, bounce rate, the average number of pages users view per visit and the average duration on the site. The company also has a free browser extension that continues checking website traffic estimates while the user is browsing the web.

  Similarweb is free to use, up to a point. However, to get the most out of this tool, you must upgrade to the premium plan, which starts at $125 per user per month.

  The price isn’t Similarweb’s only downside. Ultimately, it provides reasonably accurate estimates but is no match for a comprehensive traffic analytics tool.

  4. Checking website traffic with Semrush

  Semrush is a collection of marketing solutions for online businesses. Its Traffic Analytics tool checks the website traffic of up to 100 sites and compares that data side-by-side. For each site, it reveals the top pages, the regions from which most of the traffic comes, and the locations from which the most referrals come.

  Semrush also gathers insights into competitors’ audiences and their activity, especially activity that overlaps between the sites being checked. It extracts and analyses comprehensive data on organic and paid search, social media, and backlinks.

  

  However, there are notable downsides. Semrush can be pricey, with plans starting at about $119.95 per month or $1,199.40 annually. This cost may be prohibitive for smaller businesses or freelancers. Still, a free version offers most of the functionality but with a limited number of daily reports.

  5. Checking website traffic with Ahrefs

  Ahrefs‘s biggest strength is its organic traffic estimation capabilities. It estimates monthly visits from Google worldwide, Google keywords in the top 100 that a website ranks for, and traffic value via equivalence to PPC.

  

  Ahrefs bases its estimates on ranking data from a database of 12 billion keywords, which is why it is so powerful. It generates a detailed report that includes organic traffic estimates, backlink data, and top-performing keywords.

  However, the numbers produced by Ahrefs are estimates based on the available data and won’t always be 100% accurate. This is particularly true for smaller or newer websites that lack the data volumes needed for accuracy.

  It’s a great SEO marketing tool that’s free to use within certain limits, but there is some value in registering for a paid plan. There are several options, beginning with the $129 per month Lite plan and extending to the Enterprise Plan for $1,499 monthly.

  6. Checking website traffic with Serpstat

  Serpstat is an SEO solution that grew from a simple keyword research tool. It offers more comprehensive features to help businesses understand their website’s performance. It helps improve a site’s visibility through tools for rank tracking, keyword research, traffic checking, backlink analysis, and site auditing.

  

  It provides metrics like estimated monthly visits, traffic sources (organic, paid, and referral), and insights into top-performing pages. Serpstat also offers competitor analysis features that help to identify market trends and refine growth strategies. However, like Ahrefs, the numbers provided are estimates, which are only as good as the depth of data from which they are derived.

  The free version is fine for basic analysis, but signing up for one of the paid plans is advisable for commercial use. Pricing ranges from $59 per month to a monthly fee of $479 for the Agency plan. There is an option to pay annually at a discount.

  7. Checking website traffic with SEO PowerSuite

  SEO PowerSuite also goes some distance beyond just website traffic checking. As the name implies, it’s a suite of tools to improve website rankings.

  

  There are four tools in the suite :

  • Rank Tracker enables tracking a website’s search engine rankings across multiple keywords and search engines.
  • WebSite Auditor offers SEO analysis of website pages and recommends actions to boost performance.
  • SEO SpyGlass analyses a website’s backlink profile to highlight link-building possibilities that’d help improve performance.
  • LinkAssistant helps identify websites suitable for link-building and recommends viable outreach opportunities.

  SEO PowerSuite has a free plan and two premium plans with varying functionality. The monthly cost could be as much as $139.67, depending on the features needed. Annual pricing options are also available.

  8. Checking website traffic with Ubersuggest

  Ubersuggest is also an SEO-focused tool. It offers website traffic analysis, keyword rankings, backlink profiles, and competitor insights. These are packaged in reports that provide an overview of website traffic, including monthly organic traffic totals and the number of organic keywords the site ranks for. Ubersuggest also offers content suggestions.

  

  Like other tools in this category, Ubersuggest doesn’t collect comprehensive data, so its numbers are estimates. This means the accuracy can vary. However, it remains a solid choice for providing great insights and enhancing a website’s online presence.

  Like many tools in this category, there is a free version to give potential customers a taste, which is restricted by volume more than features. The paid plans range from around $29 per month for one website on the individual plan to about $99 per month for 8-15 websites on the Enterprise plan. Discounted annual pricing is also an option.

  9. Checking website traffic with MonsterInsights

  MonsterInsights is a tool worth considering for websites built on WordPress because it’s not a website checking tool in the usual sense. It’s a WordPress plugin that simplifies the task by integrating Google Analytics directly into a website.

  MonsterInsights then uses the raw data provided by GA4 to extract actionable insights based on audience preferences and activity. This makes it easier to focus on the relevant metrics for different types of websites. For example, the metrics used to measure a blog site would not be the same as those for an ecommerce site.

  But there are some downsides, too. While the basic version is free, it has limited features, and the most potent functionality requires a premium subscription. Those start at $249 per year for a single site, or the Pro plan at $499 for up to five sites. Agencies looking to work with up to 25 sites are in for $999.

  

  There’s another option

  Although many of these tools have free versions, those tend to be heavily restricted, and premium plans can be expensive. A website has to generate serious revenue to deliver a decent return on investment (ROI) to justify the costs.

  As more countries adopt GDPR-like privacy regulations, brands must ensure they’re using compliant, privacy-centric analytics tools.

  Matomo Analytics is one such tool. It’s an ethical, open-source solution that helps you collect accurate data about your website’s traffic and make more informed decisions. This enhances the customer experience and ensures GDPR compliance and user privacy.

  It’s completely free to install as an on-premise solution. Alternatively, there’s the subscription-based Matomo Cloud version.

  How to check website traffic on Matomo

  Apart from a better ROI picture, Matomo offers a more reliable assessment of your website’s traffic than Google Analytics 4. It also provides multiple ways to check organic search traffic :

  • Visits log report
  • Real-time visitor map
  • Visits in real-time report

  Let’s look at all of them one by one.

  The visits log report is a unique rundown of your site’s visitors. It offers a much more granular view than other traffic checker tools, which only show the total number of visitors for a given period.

  

  You can access the visits log report by clicking on the reporting menu and then clicking Visitor and Visits Log. From there, you’ll be able to scroll through every user session and see the following information :

  • The location of the user
  • The total number of actions they took
  • The length of time on site
  • How they arrived at your site
  • The device they used to access your site

  It may be overwhelming if your site receives thousands of visitors at a time. But it’s a great way to understand users at an individual level and appreciate the lifetime activity of specific users.

  The Real-time visitor map shows site visitors’ location for a given timeframe. If you have an international website, it’s a fantastic way to see exactly where your traffic comes from.

  

  You can access the Real-time Visitor Map by clicking Visitor in the main navigation menu and then Real-time Map. The map itself is colour-coded. Larger orange bubbles represent recent visits, and smaller dark orange and grey bubbles represent older visits. The map will refresh every five seconds, and new users appear with a flashing effect.

  If you run TV or radio adverts, Matomo’s Real-time Map provides an immediate read on the effectiveness of your campaign. If your map lights up in the minutes following your ad, you know it’s been effective. It can also help you identify the source of bot attacks, too.

  Finally, the Visits in Real-time report provides a snapshot of who is browsing your website. You can access this report under Visitors > Real-time and add it to your custom dashboards as a widget.

  Open the report, and you’ll see the real-time flow of your site’s users and counters for visits and pageviews over the last 30 minutes and 24 hours. The report refreshes every five seconds with new users added to the top of the report with a fade-in effect.

  

  The report provides a snapshot of each visitor, including :

  • Whether they are new or returning
  • Their country
  • Their browser
  • Their operating system
  • The number of actions they took
  • The time they spent on the site
  • The channel they came in from
  • Whether the visitor converted a goal

  Why do my traffic reports differ ?

  If you use more than one of the methods above to check your website traffic, you’ll quickly realise that every traffic report differs. In some cases, the reasons are obvious. Any tool that estimates your traffic without adding code to your website is just that : an estimate. Tools like many of those mentioned here will never offer the accuracy of analytics platforms like Matomo and Google Analytics.

  But what about the differences between these analytics platforms themselves ? While each platform records user behaviour differently, significant differences in website traffic reports between analytics platforms are usually due to how each platform handles user privacy.

  A platform like Google Analytics requires users to accept a cookie consent banner to track them. If they accept, great. Google collects all of the data that any other analytics platform does. It may even collect more. However, if users reject cookie consent banners, Google Analytics can’t track them. They simply won’t show up in your traffic reports.

  That doesn’t happen with all analytics platforms, however. A privacy-focused alternative like Matomo doesn’t require cookie consent banners (apart from in the United Kingdom and Germany). Therefore, it can continue to track visitors even after they have rejected a cookie consent screen from Google Analytics. This means virtually all website traffic will be tracked regardless of whether users accept a cookie consent banner. And it’s why traffic reports in Matomo are often much higher than in Google Analytics.

  

  Around half (47.32%) of adults in the European Union refuse to allow personal data tracking for advertising purposes, and 95% of people will reject additional cookies when it is easy to do so. So relying on cookies limits your results — and causes you to miss out on valuable user data.

  If you’re serious about using web analytics to improve your website and optimise your marketing campaigns, then it is essential to use another analytics platform alongside Google Analytics.

  What to do if website traffic levels drop

  Experiencing a drop in website traffic can be frustrating, but it happens to everyone at some point. Here’s how to address it :

  • Analyse traffic sources : Use analytics tools to pinpoint where the decline is coming from—organic search, referrals, or social media.
  • Check for technical issues : Look for broken links or slow loading times, which can deter visitors. Tools like Google Search Console can help identify errors.
  • Review recent changes : Consider any recent updates to the website. If something coincided with the drop, it might be worth reverting.
  • Evaluate content quality : Ensure the content is engaging and relevant. Update or improve underperforming posts.
  • Reassess the marketing strategy : The only constant in marketing is change. It’s wise to periodically revisit the balance between paid ads, social media and other vectors to evaluate their effectiveness and adjust the approach.

  It’s perfectly normal for website traffic volumes to fluctuate. Expect it and work with the available tools. Persistence will likely see the traffic volumes rebound.

  Get more accurate traffic reports with Matomo

  There are several methods to check website traffic. Some can provide estimates on your competitors’ traffic levels. Others, like Google Analytics, are free. But data doesn’t lie. Only privacy-focused analytics solutions like Matomo can provide accurate reports that account for every visitor.

  Join over one million organisations using Matomo to check their website traffic accurately and ethically.

  Try Matomo for Free

  Start your 21-day free trial — no credit card required.

• Multilingual SEO : A Marketer’s Guide to Measuring and Optimising Multilingual Websites

  26 juin, par Joe

  The web—and search engines in particular—make it easier than ever for businesses of any size to reach an international audience. 

   
  A multilingual website makes sense, especially when the majority of websites are in English. After all, you want to stand out to customers by speaking their local language. But it’s no good having a multilingual site if people can’t find it. 

  That’s where multilingual SEO comes in. 

  In this article, we’ll show you how to build a multilingual website that ranks in Google and other local search engines. You’ll learn why multilingual SEO is about more than translating your content and specific tasks you need to tick off to make your multilingual site as visible as possible. 

  ¡Vamos !

  What is multilingual SEO ? 

  Multilingual SEO is the process of optimising your website to improve search visibility in more than one language. It involves creating high-quality translations (including SEO metadata), targeting language-specific keywords and building links in the target language. 

  

  The goal is to make your site as discoverable and accessible as possible for users searching Google and other search engines in their local language. 

  It’s worth pointing out that multilingual SEO differs slightly from international SEO, even if the terms are used interchangeably. With multilingual SEO, you are optimising for a language (so Spanish targets every Spanish-speaking country, not just Spain). In international SEO, you target specific countries, so you might have a different strategy for targeting Argentinian customers vs. Mexican customers. 

  Why adopt a multilingual SEO strategy ?

  There are two major reasons to adopt a multilingual SEO strategy : to reach more customers and to deliver the best experience possible. 

  

  Reach a wider audience

  Not everyone searches the web in English. Even if non-native speakers eventually resort to English, many will try Googling in their own language first. That means if you target customers in multiple non-English-speaking countries, then creating a multilingual SEO is a must to reach as many of them as possible. 

  A multilingual SEO strategy also boosts your website’s chances of appearing in country-specific search engines like Baidu and Yandex — and in localised versions of Google like Google.fr and Google.de.

  Deliver a better user experience

  Multilingual SEO gives your customers what they want : the ability to search, browse and shop in their native language. This is a big deal, with 89% of consumers saying it’s important to deal with a brand in their own language.

  Improving the user experience also increases the likelihood of non-English-speaking customers converting. As many as 82% of people won’t make a purchase in major consumer categories without local language support. 

  How to prepare for multilingual SEO success

  Before you start creating multilingual SEO content, you need to take care of a couple of things. 

  Identify target markets

  The first step is to identify the languages you want to target. You know your customers better than anyone, so it’s likely you have one or two languages in mind already. 

  But if you don’t, why not analyse your existing website traffic to discover which languages to target first ? The Locations report in Matomo (found in the Visitors section of Matomo’s navigation) shows you which countries your visitors hail from. 

  

  In the example above, targeting German and Indonesian searchers would be a sensible strategy. 

  Target local keywords

  Once you’ve decided on your target markets, it’s time to find localised keywords. Keywords are the backbone of any SEO campaign, so take your time to find ones that are specific to your local markets.

  Yes, that means you shouldn’t just translate your English keywords into French or Spanish ! French or Spanish searchers may use completely different terms to find your products or services. 

  That’s why it’s vital to use a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to do multilingual keyword research. 

  

  This may be a bit tricky if you aren’t a native speaker of your target language, but you can translate your English keywords using Google Translate to get started. 

  Remember, search volumes won’t be as high as English keywords since fewer people are searching for them. So don’t be scared off by small keyword volumes. Besides, even in the U.S. around 95% of keywords get 10 searches per month or fewer. 

  Choose your URL structure

  The final step in preparing your multilingual SEO strategy is deciding on your URL structure, whether that’s using separate domains, subdomains or subfolders. 

  This is important for SEO as it will avoid duplicate content issues. Using language indicators within these URLs will also help both users and search engines differentiate versions of your site. 

  The first option is to have a separate domain for each target language. 

  • yoursite.com
  • yoursite.fr
  • yoursite.es

  Using subdomains would mean you keep one domain but have completely separate sites :

  • fr.yoursite.com
  • es.yoursite.com
  • de.yoursite.com

  Using subfolders keeps everything clean but can result in long URLs :

  • yoursite.com/en
  • yoursite.com/de
  • yoursite.com/es

  As you can see in the image below, we use subdomains to separate multilingual versions of you site :

  

  While separate domains provide more precise targeting, it’s a lot of work to manage them. So, unless you have a keyword-rich, unbranded domain name that needs translating, we’d recommend using either subdomains or subdirectories. It’s slightly easier to manage subfolders, but subdomains offer users a clearer divide between different versions of your site. 

  If you want to make your site even easier to navigate, then you can incorporate language indicators into your page’s design to make it easy for consumers to switch languages. These are the little dropdown menus you see containing various flags that let users browse in different languages.

  5 multilingual SEO strategies to use in 2024

  Now you’ve got the basics in order, use the following SEO strategies to improve your multilingual rankings. 

  Use hreflang tags

  There’s another way that Google and other search engines use to determine the language and region your website is targeting : hreflang..

  Hreflang is an HTML attribute that Google and other search engines use to ensure they serve users the right version of the page.

  You can insert it into the header section of the page like this example for a German subdomain :

  <link rel=”alternate” href=”https://yourwebsite.com/de” hreflang=”de” />

  Or you can add the relevant markup to your website’s sitemap. Here’s what the same German markup would look like :

  <xhtml:link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”de” href=”https://yourwebsite.com/de/” /> 

  Whichever method you include one language code in ISO 639-1 format. You can also include a region code in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format. Note that you can include multiple region codes. A web page in German, for example, could target German and Austrian consumers. 

  Hreflang tags also avoid duplicate content issues. 

  With a multilingual site, you could have a dozen different versions of the same page, showing the same content but in a different language. Without an hreflang tag specifying that these are different versions of the same page, Google may penalise your site.

  Invest in high-quality translations

  Google rewards good content. And, while you’d hope Google Translate would be good enough, it usually isn’t.

  Instead, make sure you are using professional linguists to translate your content. They won’t only be able to produce accurate and contextually relevant translations — the kind that Google may reward with higher rankings — but they’ll also be able to account for cultural differences between languages. 

  Imagine you are translating a web page from U.S. English into Italian, for example. You’ve not only got to translate the words themselves but also the measurements (from inches to cm), dates (from mm/dd/yy to dd/mm/yy), currencies, idioms and more. 

  Translate your metadata, too

  You need to translate more than just the content of your website. You should translate its metadata — the descriptive information search engines use to understand your page — to help you rank better in Google and localised search engines. 

  As you can see in the image below, we’ve translated the French version of our homepage’s title and meta description :

  

  Page titles and meta descriptions aren’t the only pieces of metadata you need to pay attention to. Make sure you translate the following :

  • URLs
  • Image alt tags
  • Canonical tags
  • Structured data markup

  While you’re at it, make sure you have translated all of your website’s content, too. It’s easy to miss error messages, contact forms and checkout pages that would otherwise ruin the user experience. 

  Build multilingual backlinks

  Building backlinks is an important step in any SEO strategy. But it’s doubly important in multilingual SEO, where your links in your target language also help Google to understand that you have a translated website. 

  While you want to prioritise links from websites in your target language, make sure that websites are relevant to your niche. It’s no good having a link from a Spanish recipe blog if you have a marketing SaaS tool. 

  A great place to start is by mining the links of competitors in your target market. Your competitors have already done the hard work acquiring these links, and there’s every chance these websites will link to your translated content, too.

  

  Don’t forget about internal linking pages in the same language, either. This will obviously help users stay in the same language while navigating your site, but it will also show Google the depth of your multilingual content.

  Monitor the SEO health of your multilingual site

  The technical performance of your multilingual pages has a significant impact on your ability to rank and convert. 

  We know for a fact that Google uses page performance metrics in the form of Core Web Vitals as a search ranking factor. What’s more, research by WP Rocker finds that a side loading in one second has a three times better conversion rate than a site loading in five seconds. 

  With that in mind, make sure your site is performing at optimal levels using Matomo’s SEO Web Vitals report. Our SEO Web Vitals feature tracks all of Google’s Core Web Vitals, including :

  • Page Speed Score
  • First Contentful Paint (FCP)
  • Final Input Delay (FID)
  • Last Contentful Paint (LCP)
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

  The report displays each metric in a different colour depending on your site’s performance, with green meaning good, orange meaning average, and red meaning poor.

  

  Check in on these metrics regularly or set up custom alerts to automatically notify you when a specific metric drops below or exceeds a certain threshold — like if your Page Speed score falls below 50, for example. 

  How to track your multilingual SEO efforts with Matomo

  Matomo isn’t just a great tool to track your site’s SEO health ; you can also use our privacy-focused analytics platform to track your multilingual SEO success.

  For example, you could use the report to focus your multilingual SEO efforts on a single language if searches are starting to rival English. Or you decide to translate your most trafficked English keywords into your target languages, regardless if a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush tells you whether these keywords get searches or not.

  If you want to analyse the performance of your new language, for example, you can segment traffic by URL. In our case, we use the segment “Page URL contains fr.matomo.org” to measure the impact of our French website. 

  We can also track the performance of every language except French by using the segment “Page URL does not contain fr.matomo.org”.

  You can use Matomo to track your Keyword performance, too. Unlike search engine-owned platforms like Google Analytics and Google Search Console that no longer share keyword data, Matomo lets users see exactly which keywords users search to find your site in the Combined keywords report :

  

  This is valuable information you can use to identify new keyword opportunities and improve your multilingual content strategy. 

  For example, you could use the report to focus your multilingual SEO efforts on a single language if searches are starting to rival English. Or you decide to translate your most trafficked English keywords into your target languages, regardless if a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush tells you whether these keywords get searches or not.

  For international brands that have separate websites and apps for each target language or region, Matomo’s Roll-Up Reporting lets you keep track of aggregate data in one place. 

  

  Roll-Up Reporting lets you view data from multiple websites and apps as if they were a single site. This lets you quickly answer questions like :

  • How many visits happened across all of my multilingual websites ?
  • Which languages contributed the most conversions ?
  • How does the performance of my Spanish app compare to my Spanish website ?

  Is it any wonder, then, that Matomo is used by over one million sites in 190 countries to track their web and SEO performance in a privacy-friendly way ?

  Join them today by trying Matomo free for 21 days, no credit card required. Alternatively, request a demo to see how Matomo can help you track your multilingual SEO efforts.