Best practices: Optimizing for same keyword for multiple languages

[pppez80]

Community,

Would love to get thoughts on how individuals in the past have solved for optimizing for a keyword that is the same in several lanuage - lets say in Spanish, Italian, and English - on a site that is general multi-language. I played around with hreflang in the past but given this is a competetive keyword I wonder if it is better to create one landing page that supports multiple language to centralize page authority.

My approach today would be:
- Provide introduction copy in all languages so they know they arrived at the same page; use local specific keyword variants for all languages in that copy
- Focus content selection on all regions; maybe provide some easy toggles
- Attract links form all locales

Questions:
- Is that a sound approach overall or is this a better case for lang-href implementation?
- How would you label the language code of the site if at all?
- Can this approach work well for international SEO?
- Any other recommendations?

Thanks

[goodroi]

Personally I prefer one language per url. The more things become complicated the more likely google is not going to digest the way we want.

[phranque]

Managing multilingual versions of your site:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en#1

You can help Google determine the language correctly by using a single language for content and navigation on each page, and by avoiding side-by-side translations.

Keep the content for each language on separate URLs.

Use hreflang for language and regional URLs:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077 [support.google.com]

Many websites serve users from around the world with content translated or targeted to users in a certain region. Google uses the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" attributes to serve the correct language or regional URL in Search results.

[tangor]

Define same keyword. EG. White and Blanco mean the same, but the languages are different and are NOT the same "keyword" and yet they are in context of the respective languages. Something like RADAR, however, will be a borrowed word in many languages and will have the same keyword value for all languages.

When targeting language groups it is best to keep things simple. Code of that language and don't vary!