Secondary locale pages showing in SERP when searching in main locale language

Hi,

My client has Swedish as the primary locale, with English as one of their secondary locales.

When googling for their products in a Swedish browser, on a Swedish OS, on Swedish soil, they get results from their English locale instead of the main Swedish one. This hurts their conversions because competitors are presented in Swedish right next to them.

I’ve checked with Webflow Support and everything looked properly configured on that end.

One theory I had is that this could be happening because:

  1. Their TLD is .com not .se
  2. Page title contains only the product name, which is in English. Example: Red Light Pod

Now, while we can’t change the domain, I can however change the titles. So I just did that, adding in a CMS-field called Benefit 1, and now they all contain words in each language (see screenshots below).

I have also prompted Google Search Console to reindex the site.

Let’s run through this further using their product Red Light Pod as an example.

Here’s the primary locale: Upptäck Red Light Pod · Sveriges mest sålda rödljussäng
And the secondary: Explore Red Light Pod · Sweden’s best-selling red light bed

Searching Red Light Pod yields this SERP, which is not what we want.

But when adding the company name to the search, everything works as expected and we see only Swedish results. So that disproves my theory about the page title having to contain Swedish words I think since the company name isn’t Swedish:

No clue what to do next. Is there something we can do besides hoping for the best when Google reindexes? Anyone else suffering the same fate? Thanks in advance!

It does sound like you’ve done everything correctly.

In regards to the country-specific domains… it happens that I’m in the middle of a project to split a client’s WF localized site so that it cleanly delivers under 3 separate ccTLD’s.

It’s once single Webflow-hosted site at the center, but users see locale-specific extracts" depending on the domain they access it with. Sitemap, canonicals, paths, langhref’s, local paths all are automatically updated.

The project isn’t done, and it’s a bit of a build, but it’s progressing very nicely.

If you needed that at some point, drop me a message and we can discuss in about a week’s time. Note that in this setup-

  • Client is using localization essentials
  • No auto-routing
  • No localized paths

At this point in the engineering, I don’t see any reason why localized paths wouldn’t be possible, but we’re keeping it simple for now.