An Unscripted SEO Podcast Interview

with Christina Spaulding of Manzanita Marketing

Notable Quotes

“If you are delivering content that meets your customers’ needs and questions, then you will get found. And I think AI does a really surprisingly good job of that.” ¹

“People prefer by 85% to purchase in their first language.”²

“Whenever you’re working with LLMs, my personal mantra is verify. Usually you say trust but verify. I don’t even trust them. Verify.”³

Key Takeaways

Multilingual SEO doesn’t require international shipping. Target Spanish-speaking customers in the US (25-30% of the population) with Spanish content for top-level keywords at a fraction of the competition and cost.

Translation tools like DeepL offer deterministic LLM capabilities. Unlike probabilistic LLMs such as ChatGPT, DeepL translates content consistently every time, making it more reliable for translation work—though native speaker review is still essential.

International links carry more weight when they match your target language and come from country-specific domains. Getting German links from .de or .ch domains is more valuable than German links from .com sites.

Audit your internal resources before outsourcing multilingual content. Many companies don’t realize they already have employees fluent in target languages who could serve those customer segments directly.

Exploring International SEO

Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera and this is the Unscripted SEO Podcast by Permast Walls & their precast concrete fire walls. I’m here with Christina Spaulding. We’re going to be talking international SEO this time. I’m super excited about it.

We were talking before the drop a little bit about some of your international experience. Why don’t you give us a recap on where you’ve been in the world and what led you into international SEO. Tell us a little bit about your expertise and what’s given you the authority that you have in this area.

Christina Spaulding: Well, Jeremy, first of all, thank you so much for having me on the show. Really appreciate it.

As we were talking about pre-start, my focus is international SEO, especially. So I do German and French SEO myself. I have colleagues who cover the other languages. I started learning languages in grade school. I did languages in high school, majored in them in college, and then got an internship that took me over to Germany. So I lived there for six years.

While in college, I also did study abroad programs in Quebec City, where they speak Quebecois, and in Strasbourg, France, where they speak not Parisian French—they speak a local version of French, but they also speak Alsatian. So I didn’t get to learn Alsatian, but it was really helpful when I moved to Germany because I moved to the Swiss German border where they spoke Swissdeutsch, which is probably closer to Alsatian than it is to German.

I did jobs in marketing in Germany. It was super fun. I came back to the US for personal reasons, moved out to Las Vegas and started with a German startup. They had a good business in Europe and then expanded to the US. I was their first employee. That company is called TextBroker—it’s a content creation company.

So I had to learn about SEO really fast because that was our target client—SEO folks. This was in 2009. So the SEO world looked very, very different than it does now.

The Evolution of SEO: From 2009 to AI

Christina: The thing that’s the same between 2009 and now is that there was massive changes. In 2009, you had Panda, you had Penguin. So you had to shift your marketing and SEO strategies to get away from keyword stuffing and really move into quality content.

And now you’ve got AI. We’ve seen a few examples where keyword stuffing is back—low quality blog posts that mention your topic a lot are back. But my perspective on it is that if you are delivering content that meets your customers’ needs and questions, then you will get found. And I think AI does a really surprisingly good job of that.

And it’s sometimes those tiny little details. Maybe you’re the only person that actually mentions a price. You win. Maybe you’re the only person who’s got a certain size of something. You win.

Jeremy: Yeah, someone I was talking to Matt Brooks of SEOteric, pointed out that with rankings with Google, you’re topically identified in a RAG process of the 10 sites that are most relevant that have the answer.

But really, LLMs are a selection model. They’re choosing one item out and featuring it—which is a different end goal. And part of that, it can be synthesized, it can be mashed, it can be molded based off of what the math and the model it learned off of to say, “hey, this is a relevant answer,” but it’s not looking for a specific snippet. It wants the answer and it will match that in.

So I think people forget that. I am super curious: What is the accuracy of LLMs in different languages? Because I’ve only had the experience with the type of hallucinations that we have in English—inventing authorship that doesn’t exist, coming up with facts that are adding plastic to a mac and cheese recipe.

Just kind of left to its own devices, it’s a people pleaser. So it’s going to try to please, even though it didn’t have access to the data that you actually told it to get. It just pretended that it did until you pointed out that it lied.

Christina: That mushroom was actually poisonous!

Jeremy: What is the LLM experience like in foreign languages? And is there anything unique to that as far as how the language learning model seems to spit out answers?

LLMs and the Language Data Gap

Christina: One thing I’ll say is that LLMs… Okay, so half of the content on the web is in English. Full 50% of content on the web is in English. The next largest languages have 5% of content on the web.

So what does that mean? That means our database for LLMs is massive—10 times more than any other language. So that doesn’t mean there’s no content available. There’s still reams and reams of content available in different languages. But there’s a reason that Google waited to roll out Gemini in different languages because they needed more time to do the work to get it where it needed to be.

I’m going to be honest, I haven’t done a lot of experimentation in interacting with LLMs in my target languages yet. But one thing that I think is important for English speaking marketers who are looking at going international is that we should talk about DeepL (or Deep L, whichever way you want to pronounce it), which is a fantastic tool for translation work.

Deterministic vs. Probabilistic LLMs

Christina: DeepL is an LLM, but it is a deterministic LLM instead of a probabilistic one.

So if you put in, “I want to go to bed, please translate that for me,” it will translate it the same way every time you ask it to do that. Whereas probabilistic LLMs—like ChatGPT, like Gemini—are calculating in a slightly different way, and they’re always generating a different result. Same prompt, different result.

So I think DeepL has added the rules of grammar, at least for certain languages, so that you get sentences that are more refined and more grammatically correct. There’s still issues. There’s issues with context. You’ve got four items in a list that are sentences, they’re all in your source language, they’re all formatted the same—verb predicate, verb predicate. But in the translated copy, each format of the item in the list is slightly different. So you’re like, “I gotta go fix that so that it makes internal sense.”

Probabilistic LLMs are not fact-finders. Deterministic LLMs are also not fact-finders—they will, it is less likely they will hallucinate, and if they do, it’s kind of in a patterned type way. So when you’re using it, figure out: is it probabilistic or is it deterministic? And then you can proceed forward with the right amount of skepticism.

So whenever you’re working with LLMs, my personal mantra is verify. Usually you say “trust but verify.” I don’t even trust them. Verify. Look at the stuff that you’re putting out before you put it out.

The Opportunity in Going International

Jeremy: Let’s talk about that use case you mentioned of English language marketers looking to go international. Let’s say you’ve got stair handrails that you can ship locally or you can ship them internationally. What are some of the pitfalls and opportunities that you’ve seen?

My brain jumped to—only 5% is in the LLM. That’s a much smaller pool. I’ve got a much better chance of showing up in that answer pool. But what’s the opportunity size for going SEO international on your product or service?

Christina: So I’m going to talk about multilingual as well as international because here in the US, we have Spanish speakers everywhere. Between 20 and 30% of the US speak Spanish as their first language. And there is search volume for Spanish terms in the US.

So if you are a US-based company, you can serve local customers in Spanish. And you can get top level keywords that have a teeny tiny fraction of the cost and a teeny tiny fraction of the competitiveness. Now they’re also a little bit lower on volume.

So if you are in one of those incredibly competitive keyword fields—if you are a lawyer, real estate agent, or you represent lawyers and real estate agents and plumbers—you can either spend your SEO dollars chasing after the long tail keywords, or you can split your SEO dollars.

Say, “Okay, we’re going to continue to iterate on English language stuff. We’re going to get even deeper in the weeds, give the Geminis and the ChatGPTs of the world those really niche, super weird use cases. But maybe we take a part of that money and we target a Spanish speaking customer.”

Especially if you have a service that doesn’t require a lot of explanation—if you’re a house painter, you can create your Spanish content, focus on a US Spanish speaking customer so you don’t have to worry about currency or tariffs or shipping. You can target people in your area who are searching for your product or service who just happen to speak another language.

And you can target top-level keywords. So instead of “lawyer,” you target “abogado” in Spanish. I’ve looked at this particular one. Here in Las Vegas, we have like 25% Spanish speakers, if not more. There are Spanish-speaking lawyers on TV. There’s a Spanish newspaper, all that good stuff.

Finding Language Opportunities in Your Local Market

Christina: See what languages there are around you. And then you can say, “Is it going to make sense for me to market in Spanish or Tagalog?” Or if you’re in Chicago, in Polish.

Take your local demographics into account. Census is great for this. But also, as you drive around your neighborhood, you’re going to see signs of what languages are popping in which neighborhoods. When you get out in your community, you’re going to know if you’re observant. And we marketers are observant.

Then you can research—real super basic. “I’m a lawyer, what is ‘lawyer’ in target language?” You may get two words back, may get male lawyer and female lawyer. So you can search your keyword volume tools. Hey, male lawyer, female lawyer, lawyers plural. What’s my volume for those three?

And then you can get a sense of, “Okay, volume for lawyer in my target language is really close to some of these niche keywords that I’m creating content for in English, but maybe the competition’s way lower. Maybe the volume’s a little bit higher.” And all of a sudden that becomes a really interesting potential target keyword and then you can start building out all that content.

And then you can use DeepL to translate. Have a native person look it over afterwards. From the “how much is this going to cost me” perspective—DeepL has a free amount and then it’s incredibly cheap. It’s like pennies per word. And then you can ask a proofreader to come in. You can pay them either by the hour or by the word. Proofreading starts around one to two cents per word. So two cents per word for creation and proofreading for translation. That starts to make sense if you have enough people speaking that language that you can reach out to.

The 85% Purchase Preference

Christina: Here’s the thing. People prefer by 85% to purchase in their first language.

So if you are a retailer here in Las Vegas and you want to tap into that 30% of the market that speaks Spanish, you might want to have your flyers detail your deals in English and in Spanish. Because then people are more likely to buy.

And that’s not from me. That’s a study from Weglot. They did a study because they have all of this data on regions and languages and purchasing. They’re like, “Hey, by the way—85% more likely to buy in their native language versus a secondary language.”

Jeremy: That’s a pretty convincing number.

Christina: It’s one of those things—you don’t think about it. We are in the US so steeped in English that if we’re not paying attention, we can get by without thinking about any other language. But when you look and you think about it for just a little bit, you’re like: opportunities, opportunities everywhere.

Demystifying Hreflang Tags

Jeremy: George Carlin’s one of my favorite comedians and he says, you know, there’s flammable, there’s inflammable and non-inflammable. Why are there three?

And this is my question when it comes to hreflang and hreflang regions, settings for SEO. What do you know about hreflang settings versus setting a page as locality, and what do people either get right or always get wrong out of the box when it comes to those directives?

Christina: People are very concerned about hreflang tags. So scary, so complicated. I don’t find them complicated. It’s in a different language. It should be marked as such.

If I’m working on a multilingual site, if I’m working with an e-commerce site that is shipping to Europe—they’re going to have seven languages. You need to be able to delineate what language is which. Because you want to give your user the right experience—that they get all of the things all in the same language.

Region tags are different. They are incredibly helpful, even if you’re working in the same language. You see that in US versus Canada. Language tags and region tags are both two letters. Usually your language tag is lowercase, comes first. Your region tag is uppercase, usually comes second.

So you would have EN for English and then US for the United States. But if you’re also selling into Canada, then you have EN-CA for Canada.

That will help you if you set things up right in the back end. Usually you’re using a multilingual plugin. If you’re on WordPress, you’re probably using a multilingual plugin. Shopify probably has some kind of multilingual functionality in there.

So you tell it what languages and what areas you’re shipping to or selling to or marketing to. In the back end, you set up your countries, your languages, and that way when you have currency switchers—”I want to sell tires to Canada. I need to sell it in Canadian dollars, not just US dollars”—that’s what your country code helps with.

If you’re selling to Canada, if you’re selling to the UK, if you’re selling to Australia, if you’re selling to Europe but not choosing to translate because you assume everybody speaks English over there anyway—having a country switcher that supports multiple currencies is really helpful regardless of whether you translate your content.

International Link Building and Server Location

Jeremy: I was talking to Jordan Fernandez, a Tuscon SEO agency owner working hard on an international case. Tell me about the experience of Google and ranking in Google in different languages. Are additional factors like having country specific hosting important—minor signals, major signals? What’s been your experience in that Gordian knot?

Christina: There are some things that are very similar all across the world. It is almost always better to have links coming from your target language. It is even better if they are coming from pages that end in a country-specific top-level domain.

So if you are getting German language links from a .de or a .at or a .ch domain, that’s better than getting German language links from a .com.

Because .coms often are English coded, right? Either you’re from the US or you are like an international conglomerate. Local businesses are more likely to claim a country-specific top-level domain. So if you can get from those country-specific top-level domains, it’s like a bonus. The link is just more powerful.

Not only because language matches, top level domain matches—user intent usually matches better and it’s a better experience for the user. They’re going from a German page to another German page. They’re going from a Chinese page to another Chinese page.

When Server Location Becomes Critical: A China Case Study

Christina: As to server location, server location can be critical in certain countries. I did a project for a company that we shifted from 10 languages down to three—and those languages were German, Chinese, and Japanese. The product was online gambling.

China has a very restrictive internet policy and environment. They also have an anti-gambling law. So if you really want to rank in China, you don’t care about Google. You care about Baidu.

To rank in China itself, you have to have a Chinese server and you have to have Chinese content and you have to be doing things for Baidu, not for Google. But as a gambling company or a company promoting gambling? No Chinese server is going to take us.

So we had to build a strategy knowing that we were targeting VPN traffic or expats from China who had moved out of China and were living in Canada or the US. The entire strategy had to be different and our expectations had to be different.

Your search estimates say X, but we can’t tap in to actual Chinese traffic. So let’s set our expectations a little bit lower and capture traffic that’s still really targeted at the mainland Chinese mindset—but the mainland Chinese mindset of somebody who is willing to go and gamble and to maybe skirt a rule or two.

It was all about understanding our customer, understanding the basics of the target market you’re approaching. Very, very, very basic: Is it legal? Can we promote that here?

You’d be surprised that some services that we think are absolutely normal, some sales processes that we think are absolutely normal may or may not be normal in the target country. Subscription services—you got to be a little bit careful in how you offer opt-outs. Some countries require you to have an opt-out in a certain way because some countries have a little bit more consumer protections than we do.

It is always worth it if you are looking at going into another country, just to do a quick real super basic: Is my business model going to work where I’m going?

Tourism and Expat Opportunities

Jeremy: That makes me think about the tourism industry. Maybe if you are operating SEO for a tourism business, having service pages with information for a particular nationality that keeps showing up and taking tours could be helpful.

I know if I’m a tourist in another country, I’m Googling the heck out of things to try to find information and guidance. So I can put myself into somebody else’s shoes coming to America and saying, “Hey, somebody is going to be Google.de-ing a lot to find local information.” That could be an opportunity.

Christina: 100%. One of the things that I pitch sometimes is, “Why don’t we do a landing page and an email chain?” So they land on the landing page, they fill out the form, they get the pre-translated emails directly. All of that work is done in advance and you don’t have to worry about it on site.

And you can give a disclaimer in those communications: “Hey, we’re trying to provide this information for you, but our guides, for example, only speak English, so please be ready to prepare for your visit. Just remember that your guide is English only. We’ll do our best to find somebody for you, but all of our signage is in English only, our menus are in English only—but we’d really love to have you still.”

Discovering Hidden Language Assets in Your Company

Christina: Sometimes you don’t know the assets that you have in your own company. I was talking to a bank, a national bank, and they’re like, “Yeah, we can think about Spanish.” And I was like, “Yes! You should. You have locations here in Las Vegas. You should be thinking about Spanish. You have locations all through California. You should be thinking about Spanish.”

And they’re like, “Well, we don’t have anybody who speaks Spanish.”

I don’t believe that. I’m not going to say I don’t believe that. It’s “Why don’t we do a language audit for your business?“

Just a quick survey of your employees: Do you speak a second language? Would you be comfortable speaking that in front of clients? And are you open to adding or receiving clients in that language?

And then you can have people self-identify. If you have mortgage agents and loan agents that identify “Yeah, I speak Spanish, I speak Tagalog, I speak Korean”—then guess what? You’re getting all the Spanish leads. You’re getting all the Tagalog leads. You’re getting all the Korean leads.

If you have a few people who do that, okay, you can rotate through. But you’ve got one person who already can access that community and provide them the support they need. Heck, let’s do it.

Connect with Christina

Jeremy: Give me some information about how people can connect with you, find more about what you’re doing.

Christina: I’m Christina Spaulding with Manzanita Marketing. My website is manzanitamktg.com. That’s manzanita as in marketing, ktg.com. And you can find me on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn at manzanitamktg.

And if you’re ever in Las Vegas, give me a shout out and we’ll go do something cool.

Jeremy: Sounds good. Well, thank you so much for your time. Ist sehr gut. Danke schön! It’s a pleasure having somebody who’s well versed in a more niche focus of SEO.

Christina: Excellent, Jeremy. Thank you so much. Your questions were fun, engaging. Some of them I was not expecting at all. As long as you’ve got something out of our discussion today, then I’m a happy person.