Translating your website will help you reach a wider global audience. And just like with your source language website, it is important to make sure that your translated texts can easily be found by search engines. Welcome to the world of multilingual SEO!
Ranking high in online search results is beneficial for business growth. As a result, many companies put a lot of effort in search engine optimization (SEO) when setting up their main website. When targeting new markets, it is important not to forget that these efforts should be extended to the translated versions as well. By spending time and effort on SEO for your multilingual website, you will be able to reach your various target audiences more effectively, resulting in increased sales in your regions of interest.
Let’s look at a few things to keep in mind when investing in multilingual SEO:
Keywords in the target language
An effective SEO strategy starts with thorough keyword research for every new language you add to your website. Translating the keywords from your source text can be a starting point, but it’s always a good idea to confirm whether your local audience is actually using these translated words to search for your products or services. If not, alternative keywords will need to be used. There are many tools available today to support your investigations with statistics such as search volume, keyword competition, top of page ranking, etc.
Technical SEO
Efficient SEO is a matter of combining appealing and relevant texts for your target audience with technical skills. The latter can have a big impact on the success of your website. Technical SEO for multilingual websites includes, among many other things, adapting the URL of your translated website, translating the metadata (slugs, meta information, image alt text…), and using hreflang tags. Hreflang tags are snippets of code that tell search engines which language you are using on each page.
Local marketing tactics
SEO is a complex interplay between your website, search engines and social media. Each part of the world will have its own elements in that mix. Adapting your translated website to the specific local marketing practices, will make it more successful.
It is important to know that Google is not the default search engine for all countries. For example, Baidu is the preferred search engine in China and Yandex is in Russia. To optimize your SEO strategy for these countries, you need to know how these search engines differ from Google.
Social media also plays an important role in supporting the distribution of your site content. A strong local social media presence will increase brand awareness and local influencer connections significantly.
Local content
Even if you adapt your content to the target language, not all content will necessarily be appealing to your new target audience. There may be important cultural differences to take into account, you might want to promote different products or services in different areas or the original topic may not be so relevant in the country you are targeting. Sometimes, creating completely new content, tailor-made for your target audience, is the better option.
Yamagata Europe: your expert in multilingual SEO
Yamagata Europe can support you with multilingual website content and SEO. This includes:
Do you have questions about multilingual SEO?
