Why Language preferences are the #1 SEO variable you forgot — Cindy Crumb // Mobile Moxie

Quotes

• “I have looked at a lot of SEO analytics set up and the search language is something that they forget about or set and forget but it can actually change results.” -Cindy

• “The default language setting on a phone or the default search setting actually changes search results. Google seems to be doing more than SEOs think to accommodate language.” -Cindy

• “If my phone language is set to Hindi but I searched for something in English where there is a knowledge graph, the whole set of results will be basically query matching on my English query but knowledge graph will translate that query and understand it and show it to me in Hindi if it can.” -Cindy

• “The thing is that Google only takes one default language setting. So even if you are a person who speaks three languages, only the one default language that you have set counts.” -Cindy

• “What most people do, is Im inFrance so all the people speak French and thats likely, not true. You cant just assume that everyone is speaking one language. So you need to lump up the keywords, even if the queries are in different languages they should be there. All the queries in one list and then track it and think of the language setting in your tool as the default setting on your phone. You track all of these because we know that people arent changing their defaults when they search.” -Cindy

• “What we found is that the language settings can change the results quite drastically when the language of the query matches the language of the content.” -Cindy

• “In mobile, phones are so personal that people forget the settings they have can change their perceptions.” -Cindy

• “Also, a lot of things are wrongly attributed to location while there might be other things at play changing the results.” -Cindy

• “I am looking a lot at personalization and trying to track and figure out what is Googles next move for personalized search results.” -Cindy

• “The big thing with entity understanding and entity-first indexing was that it was a more universal way for them to organize their data where it wasnt query-specific and language-specific, it was kind of universal and language agnostic.” -Cindy

• “Google is going to have an opportunity to not only understand what you are doing in one device as you move around but also what your life is like moving through your home and some other scenarios. So being able to present you not only the right information as you are moving around in a small screen but in the context of how you are consuming it is something that is going to be really interesting to keep an eye on.” -Cindy