Multilingual SEO Services Are a Must When Entering New Markets
Translating your website into the language of your new market is just the beginning. You also need to make sure your content resonates with new consumers. And, most of all, they need to be able to find you. This is where multilingual SEO services come in handy.
What Is Multilingual SEO?
The practice of providing optimized web content in several different languages is known as multilingual SEO. It goes hand in hand with multiregional SEO, which involves optimizing content that’s specifically designed for several regions.
There is a great overlap in these strategies, so we will touch on both but mainly focus on multilingual SEO. They both tie in with pay per click, content strategy, conversion rate optimization, and other aspects of online marketing.
How Do You Achieve Multilingual SEO?
So, your startup is killing it in one language, and it’s time for you to enter new international markets. You will need to devote a number of resources to this project. The temptation to launch into several new languages at once is always there, but you should first make sure you have the budget to do it right.
First, you need to evaluate whether you want to stay with your current content management system (CMS). Most of today’s most popular options—Joomla, Drupal, Magento, and WordPress—make creating multilingual websites fairly simple by letting you use a shared database.
There are many reasons why a shared database is helpful—you can control your stock across several websites, you might get a deal on hosting costs, and you can update all of your sites simultaneously when it’s time to redesign your website.
You can then structure your site a variety of ways. SEMrush has an interesting article on international SEO website structure. For most clients, using country-coded top-level domains (ccTLDs) is usually the best way to go. For instance, if you want to target France, you would choose a .fr domain.
What Keywords Should You Use?
Your next step is to figure out which keywords relevant to your organization have low organic competition and a high search volume, so when consumers search for what you have to offer, your site will pop up in the results. To find these keywords, you need to do multilingual keyword research.
SEMrush is again an invaluable resource when it comes to researching keywords. Their keyword search tool currently has 28 countries by related keywords, phrase match keywords, keywords competitors rank well for, and SEO keywords.
Once you have keywords, you can see the difficulty for various keywords and their monthly search volume.
There are a couple ways to incorporate the target keywords into your translated site. You can optimize the new content after you have finished a standard website translation. Or, you can choose an SEO website translation that makes sure the new content is optimized during the translation.
Accelingo is able to help with both options, but we prefer the latter since our experts can sit there with each target keyword’s optimized translation and ensure it fits somewhat organically into the new on-page content.
Avoid These 3 Common Mistakes
1. Expanding startups focus on Google too much
One of the shortfalls of SEMrush is that it focuses almost entirely on Google searches. However, Google is not king in every market. For example, in Russia, the most popular search engine is Yandex. In China, it’s Baidu.
Sure, many of the optimization best practices apply to all search engines, but when you cater your content to the specific search engines that people are using in your new foreign market, you are more likely to experience better results.
2. Businesses add no-index tags
Gaining traction in a new locale and engaging clients in another language are the main goals of localizing your website. But, if your translated website does not show up in global search engines, you will not succeed.
The translated pages of your site will not be crawled and indexed when you add no-index tags. No-index tags are usually added to avoid duplicate content penalties. However, Google has officially stated that there are not penalties for identical content aimed at different languages or regions.
3. Companies do not spend enough time researching keywords
For many startups, the research phase ends with identifying what markets to enter, which languages will best serve these markets, and how much translation will cost. This is helpful, but you cannot skip SEO research.
We have already covered keyword research, but an example will show you how important it is. Without SEO research, you might use your U.S. keyword “vacation rentals” in the U.K., where this is a rarely searched phrase. After researching it, you would use some permutation of “holiday rentals” instead.
Most startups do not have the in-house resources needed to roll out an effective global SEO strategy. Fortunately, there are a number of language service providers that specialize in making sure your new international websites show up high in the search results. Accelingo is chief among them.
