Sooner or later, it had to happen. Today, May 15, 2019, the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko signed a law on the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language.
In this article, we consider what awaits online businesses and why work on website translation needs to start today.
What awaits online businesses?
It's okay, just translate websites and communications with customers into Ukrainian. If your website is multilingual, you need to set the Ukrainian version as the default; if it is only in Russian, you need to create a second version of the site and set it as the main one.
Checklist for the new law:
- Companies' activities and online sales must be conducted in Ukrainian (content on the website and social networks, communication with the client, document management);
- When going to the website, the Ukrainian version should be loaded by default (other versions of the website do not need to be deleted, on the contrary - give the user the right to choose the language);
- There should be no less content in Ukrainian than in Russian.
Translating a website into Ukrainian is not difficult. The main fear of online business owners is changing the language without losing traffic and positions in search results.
Regarding non-compliance with the law
You have 18 months (enters into force 2 months after the official publication of the law) to translate the site, programs, and communications with customers (email newsletters, service messages, advertising, and social media channels) into Ukrainian.
For a single violation of the law, companies face a warning, for a repeated violation - a fine: for online business 5100-6800 UAH, for print media - up to 8500 UAH.
On the benefits of multilingualism of the site
Translating the site into Ukrainian is accompanied by the expenditure of time and money, but in the end, there is a benefit from it. The Ukrainian version of the site will increase the volume of search queries and reach among users looking for information in Ukrainian.
With a complete language change, the resource's traffic will decrease, but if you change the site's language correctly, in the future it will increase. If you translate your website into Ukrainian quickly, you can become a leader in your niche, since today only state (financial, educational, and medical) websites are "Ukrainian-language".
About creating a second version of the site
If you have a site on one of the popular CMS, such as WordPress, you can install one of the multilingual plugins (free - Poly Language, paid - WP Globus, WPML plugin). If your site is developed on one of the Frameworks or it is self-written, the multilingual module must be implemented independently.
* Poly Language plugin capabilities
The next most difficult thing is to create Ukrainian content. The volume of content should be no less than the content in Russian. It turns out that you need to not only publish fresh materials in Ukrainian, but also translate existing content, and this is a long and expensive process (content in different languages should not differ in content).
There are two ways to translate content: hire a full-time employee or work with translation companies and freelancers. A full-time employee is convenient but slow; translation companies and freelancers are faster, but not always high-quality.
It is optimal to set up teamwork to create Ukrainian content in stages, and not in a hurry using Google Translate. For example, translate a new blog article in Russian into Ukrainian and publish both versions.
How to set Ukrainian as the default language
Work on changing the language version of the site takes from 10 minutes to an hour. It all depends on the type of site and on what platform the site was developed on. There are different ways to change the language. Let's consider the option of moving the Russian version of the site to a folder, and the Ukrainian version to the main address.
If you put the Ukrainian version of the site at the main address, the site's position in search results and traffic will most likely drop, but will soon grow due to queries in Ukrainian.
When changing the default version of the site, you must adhere to the following recommendations:
1. Collect a semantic core for your niche
It is necessary to collect all key queries in your niche that have frequency. This must be done so that the translation of the site into Ukrainian is not only in compliance with the law but also brings benefits (additional traffic) to your business.
2. Add the Canonical attribute to each URL
The attribute allows you to eliminate complete and partial duplicates of content.
Perform the operation carefully: if you accidentally write the attribute not in the HEAD section, search engines will ignore it.
3. Create separate URLs for each version of the site
We create separate URLs for each page in Russian (https://site.com/ru/) and Ukrainian (https://site.com/) languages, preserving their nesting and site structure.
4. Translate content and meta tags
We translate Title, Description, and H1 taking into account the collected semantic core into Ukrainian.
This must be done at the time of testing the Ukrainian version of the site. The pages available for indexing must be translated into Ukrainian. This will avoid duplicate pages and content.
5. Use the hreflang tag for each page
The tag indicates to search engines that there are several identical pages on the site, but they are in different languages and for different countries (regions). The tag prevents pages from being glued together during indexing. It is used if:
- The content on regional sites and subdomains is partially or completely identical. For example, if the pages are intended for viewing in different regions, but in the same language;
- specialists have translated only the site template, and the content is generated by users (it is important that the content is on different URLs);
- The content is completely translated into another language (for example, from Russian to Ukrainian);
- The site is partially translated, for users from a certain region.
The hreflang tag does not give a 100% guarantee that search engines will not consider pages as duplicates, so it is better to fill the pages with unique content for each language version of the site and region.
6. Specify the language of the current page in the tag
7. Implement all improvements on the test version of the site
The test version of the site must be closed from indexing. Before transferring from the test Ukrainian version to the current (main) one, you need to prepare a .htaccess file (an additional configuration file for the Apache web server and similar servers) and register a 301 redirect (provided that you change the page URL) to save the previously acquired link mass.
8. Make a backup
It is necessary to make a backup copy of the site in case something goes wrong.
9. Save the default language version in cookies for user convenience
Cookies store user information on the site. They make the user's work more convenient. For example, they remember the user's login and the language in which the user views the resource.
Almost all multilingual plugins for CMS WordPress support the function of saving the user's language version. If your site is self-written and you need this functionality, you need to modify it yourself (cookies are not created by default on self-written sites).
Conclusions
The process of creating a Ukrainian-language version of the site does not take much time. The most difficult thing is to translate the pages available for indexing into Ukrainian. We recommend that you think about the future of your resource today since finding an experienced native Ukrainian speaker to translate content is quite a task.
If you have a site with a history, the loss of positions and traffic will be minimal, if your resource is young, the positions will sag for a while, but will quickly grow due to Ukrainian queries.
Since the competition in the Ukrainian segment is not yet too high, SEO promotion in Kyiv will allow you to bring the site to the TOP for low-frequency and medium-frequency queries without the need to create a large number of backlinks.
