If your website is in Dutch, you naturally want Google to show it to Dutch searchers. To help Google with that, the HTML of your site contains a setting: <html lang="nl">. Those two letters tell Google and browsers: this page is in Dutch.
What happens without this setting?
- Google is not sure what language your site is in
- Chrome and other browsers sometimes offer to 'automatically translate' the page for Dutch visitors (on a Dutch site, which is confusing)
- Screen readers for blind visitors read the text aloud with the wrong accent
- Google may match your site less well to Dutch search queries
Which values do you use?
nl: Dutchnl-NL: Dutch from the Netherlands (more specific, slightly better)nl-BE: Flemish / Belgian Dutchen: Englishen-US: American English
What can you do?
Just like UTF-8, this is a standard setting that is usually already correct. If the mini audit flags it as a problem, it is a 5-minute fix for your web developer.
Check it yourself
Right-click on your site, click 'View page source' and look at the first line after <!DOCTYPE html>. Do you see <html lang="nl">? Perfect. Do you only see <html> without a language? Have it changed.
Multilingual sites
If your site has several languages (for example a Dutch and an English version), each language version should have its own lang setting. Plus 'hreflang' tags that indicate which URLs are the translations. That is more complex work for an SEO specialist.