Relevance and means of preserving Russian-language search traffic of commercial sites when translating them into Ukrainian

Abstract

The risks of reducing traffic from search engines when translating commercial sites from Russian to Ukrainian have been analyzed, and measures to minimize them have been proposed. Since in the Ukrainian segment of the Internet, a significant part of Internet trading sites uses the Russian language, when they are translated into the Ukrainian language in accordance with the Law of Ukraine "On Ensuring the Functioning of the Ukrainian Language as the State", there are risks of losing traffic from search engines. Due to the fact that when searching for goods on the Internet, some users enter search queries in Russian. To assess the ratio of Russian-language and Ukrainian-language search queries, statistical data from the Google trends service was used, according to which the number of Russian-language search queries for a number of popular product items significantly exceeds the number of similar Ukrainian. In order to investigate to what extent the language of search queries affects the ranking of search results of the Google search engine, the presence of Ukrainian-language snippets in the search results for Russian-language search phrases related to trade was analyzed. According to the obtained results, this presence is insignificant and, according to the investigated semantic core, in the first hundred sites of the Google.com.ua search result, in general, it does not exceed a few percent. Therefore, in order to deliver Ukrainian-language commercial offers to the target audience that uses Russian-language search queries, when translating sites into Ukrainian, it is necessary to use additional means aimed at preserving Russian-language traffic. The considered technical solutions that allow electronic trading platforms, the profitability and competitiveness of which depends from the number of visitor transitions from search engines, in compliance with the requirements of the Law, save Russian-language traffic by adding it to the traffic for Ukrainian search queries