If you’re a website owner, then the thought of optimising your website for search engines isn’t new to you. SEO, when done right can drive lots of traffic to your website, bring in quality leads, and in the long run, increase sales.
But how about when you’re trying to adapt or translate your website for another market? Will the same SEO strategy work?
Well, the answer is both yes and No. And we will explain. While SEO principles may be the same across borders, keywords difficulty and search volumes differ per keyword. Furthermore, some search engines are more prevalent in other countries. For example, The most prominent search engine in Russia is Yandex, China uses Baidu and South Korea mostly utilizes Naver.
Hence, when trying to break into a foreign market, you must adopt a concrete SEO strategy in order for your site to boost visibility and organic traffic.
What is multilingual SEO
Multilingual SEO is the act of optimising the content on your website so that foreign language users can find your content using search engines. It usually involves incorporating local keywords and search terms into your translated content. This is important because the whole idea of having a website, a translated one especially, is to reach more people. Multilingual SEO ensures that your translated content is ranked and able to reach more people.
How to optimise your website for multilingual SEO
The process of adopting multilingual SEO for any website involves effective collaboration across professions (copywriter, web designers, linguists, etc.) and it transcends working with metrics like keyword density and volume. Effective multilingual SEO involves a nice blend of the nitty-gritty of SEO, catering to users’ search intent and taking into cognizance cultural nuances. That said, here’s a quick guide on how to optimise your website for multilingual SEO.
1. Do Your Research
The first step to optimising your website for multilingual SEO is research. There are certain regions or languages your business might benefit more from. Effective market research will help you decide on what regions/languages to focus on
An excellent way to do this is to review your site’s current analytics. With this, you can discern the number of foreign visitors you’ve been getting and the languages they speak. This way, you can determine the region or language you’re getting the highest traffic from and then optimise your site accordingly.
You can also explore other possible target markets that are hungry for your services or products by conducting a localised keyword research. You can do this by translating your primary keywords into several other languages and running them through a keyword research tool, i.e., keeping location set to all locations, entering the keyword, and seeing how much traffic they get. With this, you can discern if the market is hungry for your content while generating keyword ideas.
2. Decide What To Translate
When optimising your multilingual website, you must also decide what content to translate, which to leave alone, and whether or not you want to create language-specific content, i.e., content tailor-made for speakers of that language.
Prioritise your main pages like your homepage, about pages, navigation tools, pop-ups and CTAs, i.e., the best pages that drive SEO traffic and conversion. You could also translate your best performing English pages as well as pages that align with high volume
keywords in your target language
3. Choose A Domain Structure
The three most common domain structures are top-level domains (TLD), sub-folders and sub-domains.
Top-level domains involve using a separate domain for each language. For example, say the original site is “seosite.com”, its french site will then be “seosite.fr”.
Subfolders require only one domain and one host and are easy to set up with most CMS systems. Examples of sub-folders are
Originalsite.com
Fr.originalsite.com
De.originalsite.com
With subdomains, you get to keep the advantages of TLD without having the trouble of setting up and managing multiple domains. They are also relatively easy to set up.
4. Use Hreflang Tags
When appropriately utilised, hreflang tags help search engines determine what language your site’s pages are written in and which page is for other regions. You can also use these tags to indicate which of the pages on your site is your default page.
If you’re optimising your page for Bing as well, then you’ll need to use meta language tags instead. Meta language tags use the same language and region codes as hreflang tags.
5. Boost Your Multilingual Pages Via Backlinks
Backlinks are a great way to boost your site’s authority regardless of its language. You can discover backlinking opportunities by doing a backlink analysis on your competitor’s page. Furthermore, you could link pages of your site to each other. Internal linking is also a great SEO strategy.
Importance Of Multilingual SEO
The most obvious benefit of optimising your website for multilingual SEO is the ability to reach a larger audience and, by doing so, increase sales. Some other reasons why you should think of optimising your multilingual website include;
- Giving your business a competitive edge.
- Building trust with your customers
- Exploring more search engines
- Establishing your brand globally.
- Achieving long term growth
- Increasing customer satisfaction
Best SEO practices when managing multilingual sites
Translate URLs (slugs)
One often-overlooked element in website localization and multilingual SEO optimization is translating URLs. You should ensure that each page version has a unique URL and that this URL is translated into the target language. If, for example, your current website’s URL is siteseo.com/dance, its french version would read siteseo.com/danse.
Localise Keywords
Rather than translate keywords, you should consider localizing them. This is because a keyword in your original site may not necessarily be a keyword in your translated site. Also, a word that ranks well in English may not rank so well in another language. Instead, you may find that another word, probably related to, but not exactly, ranks better in the target country. Hence, when generating keywords for your translated site, don’t just translate the former keywords; instead, research how that keyword performs in the target country. And if you see the need to modify it so that it ranks better, then please do.
Stick To One Language Per Page
Search engines match URLs with a single language. Translating some parts of your page while leaving the rest in the original language could negatively impact the customer’s experience. If, for example, the main content is translated, but the navigation content is not, the customer will understand the main context but will have trouble navigating to other pages. On the other hand, if the main content is left as it is but the navigation content is translated, the consumer will have issues understanding your content.
Translate Your Metadata
When optimizing your website for multilingual SEO, you also want to make sure you translate your metadata. The proper translation of your metadata will improve your ranking in the new countries you’re targeting.
Make It Easy For Users To Switch Languages
Providing links between different language versions of the same page makes it easier for users to switch between languages. In setting this up, please bear in mind that using national flags as indicators isn’t always a good idea for several reasons. It’s often better that you opt for abbreviations like EN, FR or ES.
Hire A Language Service Provider
Engaging a professional translation service like Translationsinlondon will always beat using AI powered tools for your website translations. For starters, there are a lot of nuances and cultural preferences AI might miss that a human translator conversant with the culture of your target country wouldn’t. Also, google search can easily detect text produced using google translate engine and other AI tools and may consider content produced using this tool as spam or low quality.
Conclusion
Multilingual SEO done right might be that extra nudge your website and brand needs to discover new ground and launch into the international market. When optimising your site for multilingual scratch engines or just translating your site, your best bet remains hiring a language service provider. Not only will the LSP help communicate your message to the target language, but they will also help localise your site and the keywords so that they’re in line with the cultural preferences of your target audience.
TranslationsInlondon is the one-stop-shop for all your website translation and localization needs. Our team of SEO specialists are at hand to deliver best SEO practices that positions your brand at both the local and international scene. Send us a message to get started today