Last week, we made the decision to internationalize our SEO strategy. So why has Digidop, the Webflow agency based in France that creates Francophone content on Webflow and no-code, seemingly changed its strategy and started targeting international audiences with its SEO?
Let us explain everything.
Here’s the short version for those who don’t want to read:
We aimed to:
- Test the performance of Weglot for international SEO
- Learn more about international SEO to better advise our clients (structure, hreflang tags, keywords, etc.)
- Be able to analyze the impact of multilingual transitions on a website using our own data
- Share our content (blog, toolbox, Webflow templates, etc.) with more countries in a new language
- Potentially discover more profitable markets than the French market?
Here’s the expanded version for those who want more details:
Objectives of transitioning to a multilingual SEO site
At Digidop, we ensure that our Webflow sites are built with all the best practices in SEO. We specialize in local, regional, or national SEO, but we had unanswered questions about how regional or national SEO could affect international SEO. To provide our clients with the best possible advice, we decided to conduct an experiment and test for them.
1 - To learn more and better understand international SEO
The best way to learn and master a subject is to test and practice it. We are convinced of that. The famous "Learn by doing." So, let’s learn to master international SEO for a Webflow site!
2 - To thoroughly test a no-code translation tool
We have been using the translation tool Weglot for over a year now and we are very satisfied with it. At Digidop, we were originally focused on SEO in France, but increasingly, clients began asking us what we thought about this tool for an international SEO strategy. Thus, we decided to create an SEO strategy with it, providing our official statistics and illustrating the results through the tool for a multilingual site using Weglot.
Additionally, a new subdirectory feature has been launched, which our SEO team decided to utilize. Instead of using a subdomain, we wanted all backlinks to point to our root domain.
3 - To enhance the visibility of our site
The French no-code market, particularly for Webflow, is not mature. Therefore, we still have limited visibility for our brand and believe we can attract more traffic by translating our site into English for search engines.
What new markets are we targeting?
We are not currently targeting a specific market, but we are conducting larger-scale tests with an English version of our site.
The impact on our performance and on Google search
After one week, the impact on our SEO is obviously minimal. We have only considerably more pages covered, as the size of the site has technically doubled. Doubled indeed, as we now have a new URL for each page in the translated English version "example.com/en/ex"
But we look forward to sharing more about the impact of this choice to develop internationally—was it a good idea or a bad one? 📈📉