Multilingual SEO: How To Get Started With It?

Multilingual SEO = Better User Experience = More Business

This is very simple to understand.

Search engines have made it easier for brands to target specific audiences who are offering products and services in different regions. 

And to make the right audience find your product, multilingual SEO helps. 

You can just optimize your website for the target audience of a particular region and provide a better user experience to rank and get more traffic.

I can explain…

We live in a multilingual market. 

So, in the international market, the importance of language SEO is increasing to create a more user-friendly environment that connects with new audiences across the globe. 

Multilingual SEO can enhance the universal acceptance of your website. 

You can even reach an overseas market through multilingual SEO. 

So, here in this blog, I am going to provide you with some best approaches to developing a multilingual SEO friendly site. 

Let’s get started! 

What Is Multilingual SEO?

Multilingual SEO is an optimization technique used for the content on your website to make it enabled in different languages to get more international exposure.

Let me explain:

Your website may have some pages in English. 

The page opens in English when a user opens it in the USA or UK. 

But, what if somebody opens the same page or website in Nepal?

It should be in the native language of Nepal. Right? 

Because you want to target a global audience. All this can be done with multilingual SEO. 

Understand the concept with the help of the image below:

You might be wondering: 

Should you use multilingual SEO for your website or not?

Well, the statistics I am going to provide you below will help you understand whether you should go with multilingual SEO or not. 

Well, the number from the ForexSuggest case study results in regards to SEO languages shows,

435% organic traffic increase in six months, 164% impression increase. 157% Active Page Increase, 58% New Query Count Increase, and 72% CTR Increase.

It could be said that multilingual SEO is one of the best content marketing strategies that promises a large increase in traffic and puts the international market at your disposal.

But don’t confuse it with multiregional SEO, which is about creating optimized website content tailored to multiple geographic regions specifically.

Benefits Of Language SEO

Language SEO is a technique to break the barrier on the global front for a region-specific website and has benefits such as a heavy surge in traffic and getting clients from all over the world market and explicitly accomplishing your business goals.

As shown in the graph below, Chinese accounts for 1.2 billion of the online traffic and is first for both Spanish and English, which come second and third respectively in the list of languages most used on the web vs. IRL. 

So, using multiple language SEO for your website is an essential part of your marketing strategy with more than 15 languages used by approximately 2 billion+ digital users. 

The Following Are The Benefits Of Using Multilingual SEO For A Digital Business

i) With English used as the 3rd most commonly used language and only 25.3% of internet users using English since December 2017, the use of multiple languages creates a sense of belonging for targeted users.

Thus, multi language SEO helps your website gain global recognition as a business brand and promotes it at a regional level.

ii) This optimization of your website’s content creates an environment that is progressive against competitors as well as brings customized character to your business brand.

So, influence the decisions of the target audience with lingual SEO and make them feel like they can relate to your brand and belong to its culture.

iii) Multilingual SEO is a very cost-effective and cheap way to expand your business worldwide.

The experts in this SEO field push your site content to success because the elements and content are built for the desires of the industry-specific users, such as faster moving platforms and secure browsing.

iv) Language experts making your business a home company in different localities of different regions, and different countries of the world. The new technique, thus, aids brand awareness from local to global levels. 

The easiest way to say it is “Go Multilingual, Become Global.” 

v) And of course, the major part of your digital business is expanding your brand’s reach and connecting it with new audiences, making conversions globally.

vi) Connecting with new audiences increases incoming traffic and, thus, increases your business’ sales too.

Keeping the benefits in mind, let’s move on to how to get started with the technique of SEO languages.

Getting Started With SEO Languages

A website can score well in SERPs in its place of origin with localized content, but to consider the global market, you must not assume that the translation element of Google alone can drive enough success for your business in this new and trendy market.

The thing is, that even if the content has a strong lingual presence in its home country, it would not work in translation for others due to a lack of lingual relevance to other global countries, and relevance is a top priority today.

Now that you know the problem, know the benefits of using the multi language SEO technique, and want to learn how to adapt the multiple-language SEO methods to your business website.

The fundamental query in your mind would be where to start.

Worry not marketers! 

Here, in this blog, I have presented the primary standards by which you can implement a language SEO strategy on your website.

Know Your Global Audience

Considering the business goals and the areas of the globe that you want to reach is the main part of the Multilingual SEO strategy.

This is backed by a 2017 survey with shocking statistics of 94% of marketers in the US and Europe who have planned to increase their budget for content localization in the next year, making it their top priority.

The thing is, knowing what to focus on helps you by improving and raising your visibility by providing a better outlook of your website in regards to your targeted users.

For example, a Spanish customer searches for a product that you’re known for, and your Google search link takes them directly to an English version of your app and website. 

Don’t you think that they would be more compelled to visit your website if it was in their native language and could induce them enough to explore your business website in their preferred language rather than one that is universal?

Yes, it would be because only 25% of internet users are English speakers, and so it is high time that marketers provide for the other 75% with the lingual SEO of the targeted users’ requirements and needs.

Choosing The Right Platform

Most multi-language websites are usually built on the WordPress platform. This platform is the world’s most popular and widely used content management system and is home to some great marketing websites.

Also, WordPress now powers 43.3% of all websites on the internet, as shown in the data below.

But many other platforms are outside of the community of the most loyal WordPress users, such as Etsy and Kinsta, which have made an official home for many of these marketing websites too, as shown in the screenshots below.

Etsy is a US based brand, and you are looking at its Indian version. 

As you can see in the screenshot, the pricing is shown in ₹ and not in $. This is done with multilingual SEO. 

When you are choosing platforms to perform multi language SEO, remember to stick to only one content platform as it provides you with alternatives for errors or missing content.

So, when a target customer sees a website that has the language customized to their origin and the data converted accordingly, they don’t have to translate each word or convert the rates again and again.

Making it easier for them to act on their buying decisions.

WordPress.org is one such open-source platform with a self-hosted content management system for marketing website projects that makes it easier for your business by providing tools for creating a multi language website.

Note that as a global platform, the WordPress.org website is, therefore, localized and can be translated into virtually every popular language and would provide options to visitors for their preferred local language on the homepage to guide them within a website.

Targeting Language And Location

Now, you know the customers of which language you want to target and which platform would be able to guide you with the proper tools to implement multilingual SEO.

The next part is for you to research which is the most commonly used language in an area, specific countries that your targeted customers are in, and where the visibility is coming from. The process may take time, and you might not understand what you’re doing.

But do know that you didn’t learn to cycle in minutes or write in a few days or months, it did take you some time to learn.

And for multilingual SEO, it’s a matter of learning which country has the largest user population that you want to target with the customized language element.

To start things off, first, a website owner must know the whereabouts of their current incoming traffic, and if you have that data (easy available on Google Analytics’ Audience option), start with the country that has a major inflow of customers to your business.

Developing And Implementing A Native Lingual Strategy

Now, as you have worked on an almost multilingual SEO strategy, it is time to develop and implement this content strategy at both global and local levels, which could be a bit challenging. 

But one question that you must ask yourself as a marketer and a website owner is, “What is the purpose of each piece of the website’s content?”

Why? 

Well, each element of your content is to bring about massive organic traffic opportunities to your business website, and achieving this is a work in itself.

Keyword implementation, which makes up the central part of content strategy, requires primary keywords on which your content would rank on SERPs and keyword phrases that would satisfy the needs of customers exploring your content.

Keyword research and implementation in multilingual SEO help in promoting your business, link building authorities, gaining traffic, and search ranking at a localized level as well as global markets as shown below.

Every inbound piece is an on-page market opportunity, and so you must not miss out on this opportunity.

And to accomplish a better user experience for better SEO, marketers should keep an eye out for their competitors’ strategies as well as interact with local SEOs to gain different approaches for online visibility and traffic at a native level.

For content optimization, you can either hire a freelancing expert or a specialized company to explore your content enhancement options such as keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, and sometimes even use translation elements of your page content.

In short, it never hurts to get a second set of eyes to look at foreign language text for your site.

Regular Audits Of Performing Content

Audits are the checks on your business to let you know the losses and profits of your business elements, and in the case of content, it is about which content has increased your rank and which has made you fall back in line.

Most of the time, it is the unrevised content that makes your website’s visibility and development fall back, and other factors make a content strategy strong or weak.

Regular SEO audits keep an eye on these factors of your website’s content strategy so that you can improve it and get better digital opportunities.

The audits include keyword performance, visual formats, title tags, meta descriptions, headings, etc., and one such audit of content is shown in the spreadsheet below. 

The thing is, different URL name tags work for different regions and countries, same goes for visual content such as memes that may come in handy if the visuals are common in a region, such as a cricket player in India, a soccer player in the USA, or a rugby player in Britain.

Everything in a multilingual SEO must be audited and updated accordingly to keep up with the ranking and visibility where you expect it on the digital market.

How To Improve Your SEO Multilingual Strategy (Best Practices)

Multilingual SEO is an easy-to-implement enhancement to your business website that, like other SEO elements, requires proper elements and best practices and should be implemented right away to give a better experience to your target users.

Here are some tips that you can carry out using the TranslatePress multilingual plugin along with its powerful SEO Pack add-on.

Using Dedicated URLs

Dedicated URLs are proper URLs for different languages and are the most commonly used in SEO multi-language practice today as they help to avoid content penalties due to duplicate content, which may cost you your ranking as well as your visibility.

You can use a tool that gives you an easy choice to add elements of dedicated URLs to your website by adding language to it, as shown in the screenshot below.

For example, a website named “www.example.com” could have a French version: “www.example.com/fr/”, a German version as “www.example.com/de” and so on.

Use Hreflang Tags

Hreflang URLs are created by adding a hreflang tag to your website for every version of a page. That is, if a page exists in 27 languages, then hreflang needs to be in code for all 27 versions of it.

For example, an hreflang tag for a page in English is hreflang=“en”, for French it’s like hreflang=”fr,” and similarly, the other 25 pages of the website are coded in the language as shown in the code below.

These are the coded elements in the HTML part of your website development that would improve your visibility as well as avoid any duplicates.

Catching Technical SEO Problems

Technical SEO problems such as duplication of your website pages need to be found and improved to get ranked for optimization and climb the search engine ladder, SERPs.

Now, the common technical SEO problems are HTTP versions, robot.txt errors, crawling errors due to irresponsible mapping or no mapping at all, site structure causing slow downloads, and other such problems within the website, as shown in the illustration below.

The solution is using multilingual optimization for each page, whether in URLs or metadata, and introducing canonical elements to the website so that the copies can give their face value to the main webpage that the website is ranking for.

As such, other technical SEO helps increase the website’s reach and you are rewarded with the mass of traffic that you have worked for.

Have A Sitemap

I know a sitemap may seem like a heavy load of work, but a sitemap is essential for your website when your major goal is to rank and become visible among online traffic.

You can use translation via AI, which is a trend right now as almost all companies in the digital arena are using chatbots. Also, the machine translation market alone was valued at USD 650 million in 2020 and is expected to reach USD 3 billion by 2027. 

Making it a factor in your SEO strategy, it should be optimized for Google bots to let your website be easily credited by ranking on the search engines’ first page as shown in the illustration below.

And also for the customers’ easy navigation on your website, and that too, with language SEO intact on every page they want to explore. 

The thing is, multilingual SEO is a part of optimization that helps you reach global traffic while working with other elements of SEO too.

Focus On Content Optimization

As you know, the customers are compelled by your website’s multilingual SEO and content strategy, which are the main parts of it.

So, you must make an effort to add elements to it, such as:

1. By activating the feature of automatically detecting visitors’ languages through browser or IP, whichever is preferable for your website.

2. By adding a user-friendly language switcher that would make the users know about the existence of the multiple language choices on your site.

3. Keeping an eye on design and layout in different languages could help you with the character barrier in metadata. For example: in English, a headline limit of 60 characters is preferred similar to Hindi, whereas in Chinese the headline character limit is 78.

So, in short, try to fully localize your website rather than just optimizing your content only because there is more to creating a multilingual SEO website than just translating text on a page.

Conclusion 

If you are a small business and localized to a single region, you had better focus on the languages most used in that country and not go on optimizing it for others.

Focusing on a demographic helps your website to develop a multilingual strategy that you can use on your single platform website to enhance its ranking and get a lot of opportunities through traffic.

A multi language website is a great investment that presents your website accessibility and advancement to visitors from around the globe, and for this, I would say WordPress is the best choice to build a website on as it provides you with the TranslatePress plugin.