Features of optimizing an IT project when entering the German segment

Suppose you have a wonderful project. It doesn’t matter which one - perhaps it is a program distributed on the principle of shareware or a convenient social service.

At a certain stage, sooner or later, a desire arises, or even a need to expand beyond the “native” language segment for a site, whether it is Russian or English. Moreover, for non-advanced users of closed language segments, dislike for English-language sites is just as typical as for the inhabitants of Runet.

It would seem that everything is simple - hired a translator, uploaded the translated pages to the site - and rejoice. But reality, as always, is much more fun.

A few years ago, I was able to participate in the withdrawal of several projects in the German segment of the Network. I still have not forgotten that extravaganza of fakaps and troubles.

Since I’m not doing this anymore, I decided to tell the users of the hub some of the unobvious moments associated with working in the German segment, so that they would not be afraid and would not repeat our glorious rake journey.

The article is intended primarily for those who do not know the German language and do not have experience in de-net'e.

If you have any questions, I will be happy to answer in the comments or PM.

Stop. And why exactly Germany?

In the cases of which I am talking about, the popularity of the projects was stable among the Russian-speaking and English-speaking public, but European countries, in addition to Great Britain, were practically not involved.

The reason for choosing the German language was its prevalence - not only the German audience is involved, but also the Swiss and Austrian ones. At the same time, Germany is the most populated country in Europe. Which again pleases.

Problems begin

So, let's imagine that the site in German is made and indexed in search engines. Suppose, again, that we are counting on an influx of visitors precisely from search engines. Everything looks great. Here are just some inflow weak. Not even a stream - a brook. What has been done wrong?

The first problem. Great and terrible synonymy

In Russian, and in English, three synonyms are a rarity. You poked into de-net. Congratulations. In the German language, there are frequent cases when there can be five synonyms (excluding words that differ in light shades of meaning). And the worst thing is that search engines do not take synonyms into account. Different words - different results.

In addition, various dialects and slangs should be considered. Moreover, the main charm of German dialects lies in the fact that these are really dialects, and not “about” -crank- “a” -kan from the Russian language. In fact, this is a huge number of peculiar "sublanguages" with their own tradition of writing words and their own vocabulary. The differences between the dialects and official German are approximately the same as in Ukrainian from Russian.

The German that your translator most likely knows is the so-called "Hochdeutsch" - the official, "highest" German, dialect typical of Berlin and central television. Yes, all Germans understand it. But will they only do search queries on "haha" or on their own surzhik?

Practice has shown that at home.

Oh yes! Not only Russians like to distort words on the Internet and use slang. Only the Germans have the number of these slangs tied to the number of dialects ...

The second problem. Spelling

Inhale, exhale. Now relaxed and prepared to meet the second problem ...

Do you remember the dialects? That's just the same. The same word may be spelled differently in a query due to differences in dialect. We have already discussed this. And now a surprise.

Official German also offers different spellings. The fact is that at the beginning of the zero years the Germans underwent a reform of the language, more abruptly than our recent fuss with "coffee." The spelling of many words has changed.

Do you feel? A person who has graduated from school before the reform can equally well write a request both in a new way and in the old way. But Google and German search engines will consider this a different request.

Moreover. Among the Germans, the gender is designated by the article, and not by the ending. Grammatically correct will be the spelling of the word with the article in the query. You already guess, huh? Different issues with the article and without it. At the same time, they are looking for approximately equally and so that it does not make it possible to score on some variant of writing.

The third problem. Fail Grammar Nazi

Not only learners of German are protected from its rules. The Germans themselves, too. And so they almost officially put a big bolt on grammar and spelling in everyday life.

I emphasize - in contrast to Russia and English-speaking countries, where a mistake is a sign of illiteracy, or it is a mistake, the Germans write illiterate “in life”. Including for the convenience of writing on a regular Latin keyboard.

Thus, the letter "ß" can be written as "ss", and letters with umlauts (dots, as above our "ё") can be written like this - "ae" instead of "ä".

Which is undoubtedly pleasing, since the issue is different for each variant of writing ...

But a real circus starts when "ß" is found in one word and it is umlit!

However, this, strictly speaking, is not a mistake, but a generally accepted variant of writing on the keyboard. That's when they begin to specifically make mistakes, but each in their own way ...

And what to do?

There are the following methods for solving the problem:

First, do not expect anything from search engines at all, but focus on other types of advertising.

The second - optimization in the Russian sense of the word is significantly complicated for obvious reasons. As a half measure - creating a site using the most popular spelling options. This is a fairly reasonable measure if you need to ensure the influx of users from search engines in the absence of a desire to spend money on classic SEO. Before creating a site, you should study the target audience, determine the words and spelling options that have taken root there, and then create a site, after which you will compete honestly in search without any SEO.

Thirdly, if optimization is really needed ... Then get ready to put a specialist, preferably German, a round sum. It should be borne in mind that, firstly, the work will take much longer (according to experience - the amount of material for “white” optimization for a site in German is seven times greater than that for a site in Russian due to language variations), and secondly, even if you want black optimization, you can’t do it at all - the bet will be too big.

Is it worth it to meddle?

I will tell you about my conclusions.

I’ll say in advance - in principle, I have never been able to do “black” optimization in any language, so I can’t say anything about this direction, and I don’t want to - because in my opinion, this action is no better than spam.

So. In the projects that I worked on, they mostly went according to the second or third scheme.

As it turned out, in the case of sites tailored to a small CA (up to 2,000 full-fledged visitors per month), for example, highly professional, fucking with synonyms, writing and optimization does not make any sense at all, because it pays for itself poorly. Where are the traditional methods of advertising and impact on word of mouth acting better.

In the case of projects focused on a broad CA, the situation is diametrically opposite. Despite the complexity and volume of preliminary work, optimization pays off in the same way as in the English and Russian segments.

I add that subjective impressions show that in the German segment the competition in the field of optimization is much milder than in the Russian one. Obviously, this is due to the problems described above.

Thus, despite the high cost of the initial development of the campaign, efforts to maintain the project on the fly will require much less.

To summarize: you can still meddle. And it’s even necessary, since German-speaking countries represent a large market with a large number of solvent consumers.

I’ll round off on this. I hope this article helps you expand your business and evaluate your prospects in new markets. Go for it!