Like SEO strategies in your target language, a multilingual SEO strategy is essential for your website. Multilingual SEO offers content for languages across multiple locations—increasing your sales in that region. Imagine if you could translate your content in Spanish, Korean or French—then your market could open globally in these regions. Having your site operating in multiple languages can be incredibly beneficial for your sales.
If SEO’s goal is to have your website indexed by Google’s search engine—how can you optimize your content in multiple languages?
There are several critical factors of multilingual SEO you want to keep in mind while moving forward with your site.
Where Are You Targeting?
The game’s aim never changes—expanding your audience—but the method of multilingual SEO can change. First, you need to determine the regions you are targeting. Do these regions need content in another language? Which areas overlap in languages spoken? Which languages would be most beneficial to your product, brand or service?
Moving forward, these answers will help you determine your SEO and how to improve your chances of ranking in your target region. To serve location-based content to customers or users, geographic geotargeting strategies target your users’ needs across different regions.
When translating your SEO, specific word usage in your target language can affect your hits also. Multilingual SEO is a tricky but beneficial balance to achieve.
Multilingual SEO vs. Multiregional SEO
Although they often overlap, multilingual SEO and multiregional SEO require different strategies.
In a nutshell, multilingual SEO offers optimized content in several languages, while multiregional SEO is optimized content tailored to multiple regions geographically. Like your site’s original content language and region, the content is an essential aspect of multilingual SEO.
Translating your site into your target language while maintaining good SEO content is a difficult precipice—this often begins and ends with keyword hits. You should understand your target region and how language is used in this region to determine your keyword structure. Whether we address them or not, cultural differences exist everywhere—your content will change drastically whether you are trying to sell to customers in Britain, Hawaii, Dubai or Brazil.
You should understand how your SEO content will shift based on language and region when tackling multilingual SEO.
Using Hreflang
Through the “hreflang=”x” annotation, Google’s search engine bots identify URLs that should be targeted to visitors through language and geographic destination.
If you are wondering where, to begin with, multilingual SEO—Hreflang is an “HTML meta element” that specifies a web page’s language, also geographical targeting. You will need this implementation if you plan to offer your content in multiple languages.
When using Hreflang—you want to use this extension right.
Multilingual Keyword Research
Marketing content online equals keywords—they should saturate your webpage and website, but not by overloading the page. Determining the keywords in your multilingual SEO is a crucial step moving forward—you should consult SEO professionals first. Even better, consult with a native speaker in your target language or a local of your target region.
You want to maximize your organic traffic with the right keywords—you can’t do this through Google translate. Do your research on what keywords your competitors are using to target a specific market or what websites are getting more minor hits (and why). Don’t make the same mistakes!
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