How often did you feel the need to translate your website? The digital platform is one universal platform that brings people from all over the world. A multilingual website has more potential to gain followers and increase web traffic than a monolingual website. Because most users are bilinguals (or even multilingual) brands need to focus on having an official multilingual website.
The benefits of a multilingual website cannot be overlooked. There are specific elements that help a multilingual website gain popularity, increase its rank on search engines, and so on. How is it done? With the help of good SEO, the user’s experience improves, the specialists make sure that the SEO practices are benefiting both parties – business and the customer. So when it comes to SEO, you have to make sure that content is approved and is not duplicated or censored by any means.
For a multilingual website, Google has laid best practices on the display to improve the website ranking.
How is multilingual SEO different from standard SEO?
Every time a digital marketer talks about lead and traffic generation, it all revolves around the SEO practices. As most businesses are not marketing experts, they outsource the SEO specialists to make their website visible on Google.
A multilingual SEO optimizes the website content in multiple languages. This makes the website more accessible to local markets, and users from various countries can find the website. This is possible when SEO specialists focus on the content for the native speakers other than the original language of the brand.
Although English is the lingua franca, it is not the first language of the majority of online users. So even if you plan to target the audience in the USA, you will target in other languages as well, like Spanish, French, and Latin, and so on.
Result: A multilingual SEO practice boosts your visibility, improves the web traffic, and optimizes the website rank.
Ways to plan your multilingual SEO strategy
So have you decided to opt for a multilingual SEO strategy? That’s great! Now you need to consider your SEO strategy to improve your website.
Step 1: Understanding the audience
Begin with your audience. Target the country and look out for their search habits. For this purpose, keep the focus on the target language that your audience speaks. Internet habits of users also vary from one country to another. So you need to keep 7 things in mind;
- The use of social media and how you can use it to your brand’s advantage that supports your onsite SEO practices.
- How you can do link building in the multilingual domain.
- Search local terms and creation of content strategy accordingly.
- Keep an eye on visitor statistics by using Google analytics.
- How Ecommerce optimizes the products according to the local market and improves the SEO.
- The domain name in more than one language.
- Search engine results on various versions of Google search.
Step 2: Using dedicated URLs
What makes marketers fear online content? The duplication.
Since content duplication is a major factor for a multilingual website, Google can easily deduct the content duplication. So does it mean that if you use the same content in multiple languages it will be content duplication?
To avoid any risk, Google recommends using “dedicated URLs”. These URLs include language indicators that help a user identify the language. For instance, instead of creating a new domain for the products, you can just change the URL from www.samplexyz.com to www.samplexyz.com/fr (sub-domain). The “fr” is the acronym for French.
Sometimes, the language indicator can be misinterpreted as well, so make sure that your website is SEO oriented.
Step 3: Don’t ignore the voice search and mobile search!
Google introduced voice recognition and since then the voice search has driven users to optimize their search habits too. It’s easier and a convenient option, so this gives websites a chance to optimize their content in multi-languages. To make this an effective strategy, you need to conduct thorough research, especially for the voice-specific search terms. Using features snippets is helpful.
The next step is to focus on the mobile SEO strategy. If you enter a market where most internet users are mobile users then it will become a problem if your SEO strategy doesn’t cover it. The mobile search results differ from desktop search results. So if you want to have a high ranking then consider making your SEO strategy mobile user-friendly too.
Step 4: On-site and Off-site optimization
On-page SEO is about your website. To make it more visible on Google or other search engines, the SEO will vary accordingly. Google is the most used search engine, so you need to raise your rankings the way Google will catch it. Using 200 unique touchpoints for a single website, Google decides how to rank the website. If the content is simplified, it is easy to read by the robots, Google will rank it faster.
It is suggested to create the content in the native language of your target audience. If the content is location-specific, it cannot be duplicated but if you translate it into multiple languages then it is a new content generation for each language. You just need to keep the cultural and language nuances in mind while doing so.
Keeping the off-page SEO in mind, multilingual link building should be your first choice. For this, write content in the multi-languages and suit them to the targeted websites. Also, focus on the quality of the content especially if the content describes your products and services.
For instance, if your products are apparels then targeting the fashion blogs is your first choice, to begin with, and so on.
Last words
SEO helps a website to rise in ranks if the content is optimized in the right way. Translating the content by keeping the target audience in mind is helpful and increases your traffic too. Multilingual SEO can be confusing at first, you need to experiment with Google search and develop the content that best meets the user’s requirements.
You have to keep several factors in mind when doing the multilingual SEO. It’s all about how you translate the content!
