It is not possible to transform your company into a multinational corporation overnight. Localizing and translating your website allows you to quickly interact with prospective worldwide customers about your products and services. However, just translating and localizing your website is insufficient.
Your efforts will only deliver real results if you take the further step of implementing multilingual SEO.
We’ll discuss what multilingual SEO is and why you should use it on your website.
What is Multilingual SEO?
Multilingual SEO is the discipline of optimizing your website across several languages. The idea is to guarantee that various audiences speaking different languages may quickly find your site’s content from anywhere in the world via organic search.
Multilingual SEO helps you develop content in many languages and guarantees that it reaches the intended audience.
While American English is the most common language on the Internet, only a small fraction of netizens claim it as their native language. This implies that if you want your firm to succeed on a worldwide scale, you must expand your SEO efforts beyond English.
When translating Google search results, using automatic translations such as Google Translate may be the easiest alternative. However, a multilingual website SEO plan is essential if you want the greatest results.
How to do multilingual SEO?
- Start with Quality Keyword Research
To begin, conduct a thorough keyword analysis before translating your website content. This is because various subsets of your global audience have distinct interests—or search intent.
Consider the keywords ‘content production’ in English and ‘creation de contenu’ in French.
The French translation has a far lower search traffic than the English version.
Quality keyword research helps you put your translation and localization efforts into perspective. This allows you to analyze which keywords to focus on for each translated version of your website.
Gaining mastery of properly using keywords in your language may be challenging. You will avoid utilizing keywords that do not improve your content’s SEO performance. Doing this in numerous languages you do not understand might be much more difficult.
- Translate your URL Slugs
When translating your website, you should also pay attention to the URL slugs. Slugs are components of your URL that come after your domain name. For example, if the URL for your website’s payments page is mysite.com/payments, a consumer looking in French should see mysite.com/paiements.
The slugs used here are “payments” (English) and “paiements” (French). This is beneficial to both search engines and actual human visitors since it makes it apparent that these are two copies of the same website but in different languages.
- Apply hreflang Tags
Hreflang tags provide direct messages to search engines about the language and geographical targeting of a webpage’s content.
Hreflang tags are essential for web pages that serve different nations or languages. They guarantee that search engines present the most suitable version of the material to viewers. For example, if your site offers information in English for the United States and the United Kingdom, properly integrated hreflang tags will help discern between these versions, catering to small variances in language usage and preferences.
Hreflang tags assist prevent duplicate content penalties by indicating the languages or regions a page is intended for. Even if the content is similar or identical across language variants, hreflang tags indicate to search engines that this is deliberate rather than manipulative duplication.
A hreflang tag is an HTML attribute used in a webpage’s section. It informs search engines like Google about the page’s language (using ISO 639-1 codes) and geographical target (using ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 codes).
For example, a French version of a site for people in France might use the hreflang tag: This tag helps search engines realize that this page is intended for French-speaking people in France.
- Create a Multilingual XML Sitemap
The multilingual sitemap, like any other sitemap, helps Google better comprehend the structure of your website. A multilingual XML sitemap informs the search engine about the language and locale used on each page of the website.
- Translate the Site’s Metadata
Finally, certain parts of your website are hidden from visitors since they are only visible to search engines. These components are collectively known as metadata. It is practically impossible to drive traffic to your website from individuals who speak languages other than your native language if your metadata is not translated.
To be more specific, your site’s metadata includes mostly the SEO title and meta description of each page. Other aspects include tags, picture alt text, and so forth. To achieve the best multilingual SEO performance, you should translate each of these items for each translated page of your site. The good news is that TranslatePress makes this process simple.
- Strategic Internal Linking
Internal linking, or the practice of connecting to other pages on the same website, is critical in SEO. It helps search engines comprehend your site’s structure, distributes page authority across your domain, and makes your site easier to navigate.
When administering a multilingual website, it is critical to ensure that internal links point to the appropriate language version of a page. This approach improves the user experience and your site’s SEO performance by sending unambiguous signals to search engines about the connection between pages in different languages.
Multilingual SEO: A Key to Business Success
A multilingual website, without question, SEO is an essential tool for expanding your organization globally. Translating your website into one or more languages benefits your business since it can enhance multilingual traffic and conversions. However, merely translating your website is not sufficient.
To take your business to the next level and connect with the enormous worldwide audience you’ve always coveted, you must use language SEO best practices.
The procedure may be difficult, but luckily, MarketingLad provides a straightforward solution, making multilingual SEO a snap.
FAQ
1. What is the difference between International and Multilingual SEO?
Multilingual SEO is the practice of optimizing a website’s content for audiences that speak a variety of languages. This is especially significant for firms looking to reach a larger global audience.
International SEO, on the other hand, is content optimization for overseas nations that do not necessarily understand other languages. For example, a company situated in the United States may wish to reach out to a UK audience. Because of the many English language variations and cultural contexts, the company needs worldwide SEO.
2. What do you need to set up multilingual SEO in WordPress?
- Properly researched keywords
- Hreflang tags
- A robust translation plugin
- A readable URL