Hösli Hi guys! First of all I'd like to thank everyone here, it's an amazing group and it helped me a lot during the last months. So, I'd like you to review the site I'm working on. It's in the CBD niche and as you know it's one of the most competitive niches out there and I'm in this world from less than 7 months so… yeah, I've not chosen the easiest way to start. A bit of context: We are located in Switzerland and the market here is quite unique. We can't ship out of our borders and we have 4 (!) national languages for a population of like 8 million people. There are 3 major languages used in the seep: German, French and Italian (in order from the most used to the less one). The site is www.slowweed.ch, I'd appreciate for a review or any kinds of tips 🙂 What did I do to the site: So, the site was completely mess up, no H1's (or more than one), no H2, H3, and so on. The money pages, the collection pages, had no text at all, and there were other things I had to fix. So I fixed everything I could and started working on the content side, I wrote some blog articles and we started seeing some results. (You can see the search console graph). We are in the Italian part of Switzerland (300k people) and we started ranking here and in Italy (but as I said we can't sell here). So my plan was to start working on the German and the French part of the site, so (mid December) I changed the url structure (we are using weglot, so the options were very limited) from a "slowweed/a/l/de/collections/olio-cbd" (this is the German page, but as you can see the page was still in italian, so not very good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)), to a "de.slowweed/sammlungen/cbd-oel" structure. I'm not very happy with the subdomain structure but weglot said it was the best option so… I did what they said. The barriers and the problems:
I'm doing all of that without budget, so it's kinda difficult to keep the content creation part going smoothly as I want, as I'm working on this project part time. I handle all the email automations, marketing campaigns and all that stuff, so the time I can afford to work on the SEO side is very limited The rankings improved over time and now we have good positions in our regions, but we have lost all the rankings for the French and German language (we had just a few of them and were very low in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP), but now our pages are not showing up at all)
My plan in the next few months: My plan now is to continue with the content creation and to continue reviewing all the automated translated content. But I'd like to know from you what do you think and what you would do in my position, the priority is to start ranking in French and in German and I'm SURE I made a ton of mistakes and I'm sure I missed a lot of things. I would really appreciate any tip, any idea or anything in order to learn and to understand better what I'm doing and what I have to do. Thanks for reading 🙂 9 👍🏽9 18 💬🗨
Kuba Subdomains are like separate domains so you essentially start from the beginning. You don't need an internationalization plugin like weglot if you're not using hreflangs extensively. You can create separate WP instances (for best compatibility) in subfolders or create one WP network with subsites in subfolders. This would essentially be like running 4 separate websites but they can be copies in other languages. Remember to have a global landing page at www.slowweed.ch/ that will link to all of those language versions. Slow Weed | Swiss Cannabis CBD | Fiori | Oli CBD SLOWWEEDCH Slow Weed | Swiss Cannabis CBD | Fiori | Oli CBD
Johnston So would you have each language on the same domain…something like slowweed.ch/en slowweed.ch/fr slowweed.ch/de And then have someone translate page by page?… Errore 404 Not Found SLOWWEEDCH Errore 404 Not Found Kuba Yes, and link to all of them from the root / Hösli ✍️ » Kuba This was exactly the structure I was looking for, but the site is running on Shopify and we have the whole site translated with weglot, and with weglot I only had the choice to use subdomains. Can I create different subfolders without a plugin with Shopify?? Kuba » Hösli Ah, I assumed you were using WordPress as I know weglot from that platform. Apparently there's an open beta for subfolders for Shopify see here: https://roadmap.weglot.com/87 Subdirectory instead of subdomainWeglot Roadmap Feedback ROADMAP.WEGLOT.COM Subdirectory instead of subdomainWeglot Roadmap Feedback Hösli ✍️ » Kuba Thanks very much, I'll reach the weglot team and see if they can do something. (I think they already hate me 'cause I've been busting their balls for like 2 months asking to automate the schema markup translation😂
Jackson Super interesting but cool. Great results. I also do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the cbd niche in the German speaking part of Switzerland and man is it competitive
Hösli ✍️ » Jackson In german yeah, very competitive, but I'm not looking to rank for the big ones like "cbd öl" or "cbd kaufen", I'm looking for less competitive keywords, for now without many results😒 Jackson » Hösli Yea trust me the only thing that worked for us was getting forbes mentions and links 😂😂. That's when we noticed a huge difference Hösli ✍️ » Jackson Yess I've studying the big ones like hanfpost and greenpassion and the only thing they'de doing is linkbuilding… But I need to find another way since my budget is 0😂
Jackson Regarding losing the rankings for the french and German pages just make 2 diff sites in those languages. We did that for a client in zurich and just used the href lang tags for each one and it was fine
Hösli ✍️ » Jackson 2 different sites like with different domains? 'Cause using subdomains Google tends to see them like different domains as well Jackson » Hösli Yea we just changed the ch domain to fr for example and the used the href lang tag to say location ch and languge fr Hösli ✍️ Okay thanks I will surely consider that option, never thought about it. The problem is then I'll have to manage 3 sites instead of 1
