The day has finally come – you have decided it is time to take your business international. Prospects and potential customers are searching all over the world for your products and services, but because your website only caters to one region of the world, you’re missing out on the opportunity. You need to figure out a way to get your content in front of all those eyeballs and in the language they’re speaking!
What this means for your SEO strategy is a leap into advanced optimization practices. There is a ton of information to digest about international SEO , so make sure you really understand exactly what you’re getting yourself into before you dive in. As with any SEO campaign, it’s best to start with your business goals and customer expectations first, then build a game plan on how to effectively achieve those goals.
Remember, Google wants to provide its users with the best information in the shortest amount of time – so if you build your site’s content with this in mind, you’ll be well on your way to ranking in any language or region you’re targeting.
That’s easier said than done, so let’s jump right into the process!
Multi-Lingual vs. Multi-Regional
It’s important to align your business goals with your new SEO strategy to make sure you’re targeting the right audience producing content they will want to read or watch. This brings us to the super important question of whether you want to target specific languages, regions, or possibly both.
Let’s look at a real world scenario using a fictional company we will call IceStix. Now, IceStix’s new line of light-weight hockey sticks are selling like hotcakes in the U.S., and the company is obviously looking to target the international markets in Canada and eventually move into Russia and other Eastern European countries.
In this scenario, IceStix is going to be targeting BOTH the country of Canada and the French language. They’re going to have a two-pronged SEO strategy that focuses on content targeted to the Canadian audience (for example, player bios of Canadian-born players who are sponsored by IceStix, news and blogs about Canadian hockey teams, local hockey league information, maps of rink locations, etc), and then will need to create a French language version of this content as well.
IceStix will have its main website (icestix.com), followed by it’s sister Canadian site, icestix.ca (which will feature similar content written in English but catered to the Canadian audience, which will also have a subfolder for French-speaking visitors (icestix.ca/fr) with the same content properly re-written in French.
There are many discussions from the best SEO minds out there on the different ways to approach this – the method outlined above is just one of many. If going with a ccTLD (country-code Top Level Domain) isn’t an option, you could always start with sub-directories from the main URL. Different scenarios can call for different options, but chances that are using a ccTLD is the way to go. When IceStix is ready to jump into Russia, it can take the strategy above and create content at the icestix.ru URL.
The important thing to remember here is the content – each site has to be built with the user and audience in mind. None of the technical aspects of international SEO matter if you’re not creating content that makes sense for the visitors from each region. At the end of the day you still have to build links to really own the SERPs and that includes getting links from that region. If you’re not publishing awesome relevant content, chances are you’re not going to be obtaining killer links and your geo-targeting strategy will be dead in the sand.
Technical SEO Considerations
Obviously your “usual” SEO best practices should be put into place for each new website you build, but there are some additional on-page tweaks you can do to make sure Google is indexing your content properly, AND that it knows this content is targeted towards a particular region.
IP Address
One minor ranking factor to take into consideration is your hosting and IP address. For example, IceStix might start off by hosting their website all on one American server in subfolders (icestix.com/ca) but as it’s geo-targeting strategy grows and it moves to it’s own ccTLD, it would be a good idea to have the website hosted with a Canadian IP address. Again, it’s a very minor ranking signal (a disputed one at that), but is a good idea if you want to cover all your bases.
hreflang
Google has a special tag it suggests using for those targeting other languages. The “hreflang” tag can be used to tell Google which URLs it should index and display for searchers (so you don’t get hit with a duplicate content penalty). There are multiple opportunities to use the hreflang tag, including sites that perhaps only change the navigation or template (forums typically do this) for different languages, sites that have similar content that is re-written in different languages, and those sites that feature completely original content. In addition to using the correct hreflang markup in your header you can also submit it via a language-specific XML sitemap.
Google Webmaster Tools
Another option for properly notifying Google about your international content can be found right in Google Webmaster Tools. If you’re starting out by just using the subfolder option, submit these in Webmaster tools. Obviously when you move to the ccTLD you’ll have to submit these as new sites, but in both scenarios you have the option of defining a specific geographic region.
Usability Considerations
As we covered earlier, understanding your audience is going to ultimately lead to campaign success in your international SEO efforts, and in more ways than you probably even considered. Sure, having awesome local content is going to play a major role, but you also need to understand how your users consume that content .
Translation
This step is one most often outsourced; making sure it is done properly will be crucial to not only your SEO, but your conversion rates as well. Remember, at the end of the day rankings are meaningless if the traffic you are getting does not end up in the visitor taking some sort of action.
Make sure the content you’re translating is taking into consideration user intent and variations of keyword phrasing (which by the way should help you in finding new keyword opportunities). Have real people who speak and understand the language help re-write this content properly – you don’t want the success of your efforts relying on poor translation or JavaScript auto-translators.
Attention to Details
The more you go down the rabbit hole of multiple websites for language/region considerations, the more it starts to make sense to develop specific content catered to these audiences. If you’re including pricing on goods and services, you’re going to want to use the right currency. Including business hours? Make sure you consider their time zones.
Do you have a country-specific address and phone number? You’ll want to re-visit your local SEO checklists and see what makes sense for each region, including your Schema markup, Google My Business, and Bing Business Portal profiles, and even local country-specific search engines. All of these details will lead to better SEO and boost trust in your user-base.
6 Essential Tips to Rank In All Languages
With these next 6 actionable tips, your multilingual SEO is reflective of these above-mentioned aspects – and effective.
1. Translate Everything
Yes, everything! And yes, it does sound overwhelming. But, ultimately, this will prove valuable to your website and your entire business.
For one thing, when it comes to ranking, Google doesn’t like bilingual websites. Indeed, Google can determine the different languages of a website page, but Google also recommends that you use only one language per page and steer clear of side-by-side translations. You should use the same language for all your website content including headers, menus…etc.
If you want to have your website in different languages, you should create separate versions for each. But a mix-and-match of multiple languages within the same version of your website certainly hampers your multilingual SEO efforts. And any expert multilingual SEO agency knows this by heart.
2. Translate Everything Well
This may sound obvious, but only a few realize that your low-quality versions of your website can drag down your original, high-quality version. The overall site quality encompasses many different things; one of them is poor translation.
This is what Google’s John Mueller confirmed!
As you are trying to build on the long-standing success of your original website that’s doing so well in terms of SEO, search engines, particularly Google, may not appreciate your poorly translated versions. Moreover, Mueller indicated that your original version will definitely suffer. It’s double trouble. While this can put extra stress on you, a professional team of translators and language specialists can be your best bet. And it goes without saying that machine translation isn’t an option.
3. Use Human Translation instead of Automated (Machine) Translation
Consider this an extension of the previous tip. We already established that for your multilingual website SEO to perform well, you must rely on experienced translators or a translation service provider that knows what’s at stake.
But you should also probably know that if you want your translated content to get indexed, Google recommends avoiding machine translation. Automated translations are often inaccurate and sound mechanical, which confuses your users. Moreover, these translations can be perceived as spam, which degrades the user experience, and eventually traffic and conversion rates.
So if you want to rank well, it’s typically tied to improving your users’ experience by making sure the translated content is accurate. You’ll then need to make sure that the translation and editing of your website content must undergo human translation and proofreading to meet SEO requirements and users’ expectations.
Choose an SEO translation agency that also works with adept translators and subject-matter experts and that follows robust quality assurance practices at every step to ensure fluent and flawless translations that connect and resonate with your target audiences. However, in the case that you opt for machine translation, professional language services providers are equipped to offer Machine Translation Post-Editing to polish and fine-tune your machine-generated translation and ensure the greatest degree of accuracy that matches a human translator’s.
4. Consider Your Audience’s Cultural Affinity
Those who are involved in SEO probably already know that high-quality content is the most important factor. And while the quality of the content is hard to define, there’s one thing that industry experts can agree on, and that is the quality of the content boils down to users, which reflects on search engines. In multilingual SEO, high-quality content is bound by regionally-focused SEO strategy, localization, and cultural adaptation. This means that your website content and keyword translation should be grounded in your target audience’s culture, preferences, and behavior. This includes using the proper dialect, taking into account cultural references, trends, and pop culture, and considering contextual nuances, among others. This is only possible if your team can deeply immerse themselves in the target culture, or better yet if you rely on a translation company that relies on local teams of native-speaking translators. As local experts, they can provide reliable and tangible cultural feedback and insights, helping craft multilingual communications that don’t only make sense to your target users but most importantly entertain, entice, and engage them.
So, technically, if you don’t have quality content, you won’t rank well.
5. Implement Keyword Research
For good SEO results in all the countries you want to target, you’ve got to do your keyword research. It’s recommended that you come up with a list of keywords that you think are relevant or meaningful to your audience and match their search intent.
Those will be the words that will define your message in any language. Your translation team should inject these keywords into the translation, while avoiding literal translation or awkward keywords that can be irrelevant, meaningless, or even offensive to your audience.
The country specifics will impact your keywords. You should identify the ones that work well as early as possible, considering your target audiences’ local slang and colloquialisms.
Utilize keyword tools to the fullest extent. By using Google Trends or Moz’s free SEO tools you’ll be able to locate trending terms that may boost your ranking. Some paid options like SEMRush, Ahrefs, Spyfu, Ubersuggest, or Moz’s can also be useful.
6. Get the Multilingual Report in Google Search Console
To track your website’s ranking in Google searches, you can use this SEO tool to enable Google Analytics. Google Analytics will help you determine how your website is indexed by search engines on the Internet and improve its ranking. Additionally, a very useful tool in the Google Search Console is International Targeting Tool. It mainly helps you detect errors in your site’s hreflang tags.
So, What Are You Waiting For?
Those who want to succeed are going to have to think outside of the box and develop strong off-site campaigns as they do their on-site SEO. The hardest part is getting started. Don’t let the technical hang-ups keep you from what could be a great addition to your marketing and business strategy. Once you start building the content (even if you start with a sub-directory), you’ll begin developing the processes that could open doors for your future SEO strategy.
