If you have a business that serves clients from around the world, you need to apply multilingual SEO best practices. With these tactics in place, you can ensure that your website is accessible and useful to a diverse clientele.
Good SEO not only earns your website the approval of Google but also improves the website’s overall user experience. When clients and prospects see the correct pages for their location, you stand to increase conversions and raise your revenues.
Wrong multilingual SEO, on the other hand, can lead to duplicity, which can prompt Google to demote the website.
This post explores the multilingual SEO best practices that will help you avoid those issues and bring organic traffic to your multilingual site.
What to Consider With Multilingual SEO
Before investing in multilingual SEO, you must first understand who your clients are, where they live, the languages they speak, their search habits, and the search engines they use.
SEO practices and search habits vary from one country to another. A proper understanding of the target audience will guide you on how best to translate your content and manage your SEO metadata.
Other considerations that you need to consider include:
- Which pages on your website attract the most international clients? Use Google Analytics to determine which countries have the largest share of these international clients.
- Are there regions or territories that you can target using the same language? You can target American, British, and Australian clients, for example, using the English language.
- Social media use: can you use social media for on-site SEO backlinks?
- Is the target market ready for your products or services? You don’t want to invest in multilingual SEO for a difficult target market.
- Which currencies do they use, and how easy will it be for you to receive funds in any selected international market. You don’t want to invest in multilingual SEO for clients who can’t pay you, regardless of how interested they are in your product.
- Is your domain name acceptable to non-English speakers, or will you have to rebrand?
Best Practices for Multilingual SEO
Now that we have covered what to consider before crafting your priorities, let’s dive into the multilingual SEO best practices now.
Conduct Multilingual Keyword Research
You probably know that your web marketing content must have a primary keyword phrase for it to be discoverable on the internet.
Multilingual keyword research will tell you the most searched keywords in your target foreign market.
While you can easily find the best keywords to use for your local / domestic SEO content, multilingual keyword research is best left to professional SEO companies.
These companies have native speakers within their ranks and can not only translate, but lso fully localize their research and content generation. Localization involves understanding of slang, colloquialisms, and culture.
They also know the best SEO practices in many countries, and they have more effective keyword research tools than typical marketing pros.
Work with Professional Translators
Apart from working with SEO professionals, you also need to hire a professional translation company to handle all your translation needs.
Don’t be tempted to use a bilingual friend or employee to translate your website. You almost certainly have no way of knowing their weaknesses in the target language.
They could also deliver the wrong message, alter the intended meaning, or omit important content due to their lack of proper language training. Such translation errors can cause irreparable damage to your brand reputation.
Professional translators deliver technical or complex concepts in the most relatable and acceptable terminology. They are well-educated in the field of linguistics, which improves their knowledge and proficiency.
And because translation is their primary business, their consistency, grammar, translation tools, and insight are way beyond what an amateur translator brings to the table.
They know how to be culturally correct and to make accurate local references. Lastly, a professional translator knows how to navigate through different dialects within a broader language.
Don’t Forget to Translate Your URLs
Let’s assume that your website is yourwebsite.com and you have translated a page named “fashion” to Spanish. Currently, the page has the URL yourwebsite.com/fashion.
After translation, it should appear as yourwebsite.com/moda to make it relatable to the Spanish audience.
Translate Your Meta Descriptions as Well
Internet users look at your meta description before deciding whether or not to click on your link when you show up on a Search Engine Ranking Page (SERP).
You cannot, therefore, leave your meta descriptions in the English language when the content is in, for example, French.
In addition to translating the pages themselves, take care to also add relevant French keywords in place of the English versions you originally applied.
Apply HREFLANG Tags Where Applicable
Hreflang tags tell search engines which language and geographical region your page is targeting. Be sure to insert them in the header section of the original page as well as the translated versions.
Here is an example of a hreflang tag for a French page for French readers in France:
link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com” hreflang=”fr-fr” />
If you translated the page for readers French readers in Canada, the hreflang would be:
link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com” hreflang=”fr-ca” />
It is advisable to hire an SEO expert to translate hreflang tags for you.
Conclusion
When creating a multilingual site, always consider the five tips above for your content to pass the duplicity test and reach the proper international audiences.
By following multilingual SEO best practices, you will be able to boost your rankings, improve the overall user experience, and help you achieve business success.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
This guest post brought to you courtesy of Return On Now, Professional Austin SEO and PPC Services Company.
Rilind Elezaj
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