SEO translation for your global website

Creating a multilingual website is slightly complicated than running a single-language site. Aside from having to create different language versions of the same website, you have to work much harder to make sure your pages rank where they should, in the language they should.

The steps you need to take when building a multilingual website and provide reference to assist you cover the key procedures. Here is SEO translation checklist for the planning, development and optimization of your multilingual websites.

Research and planning for SEO translation

Even a single-language website can have a lot of audiences to cater for, which requires extensive research and planning. This process increases once you start targeting foreign languages and you need to have the following steps covered:

• Audience research: Each target language will comprise of multiple target audiences, some of whom may have different personalities to the ones you’re used to targeting. Therefore, start again with your audience research for every language and make no assumptions.
• Search habits: Can vary (desktop vs mobile, search vs social, etc.), and this means your SEO strategy needs to follow suit.
• Keyword research: Research for every language/region to see what your audiences are interested so you can use the exact search terms.
• Competitor research: Your competitors’ tactics are going to vary in different parts of the world and the expectations people have from your brands will vary too.
• Opportunity research: You need to research where your opportunities are for tactics such as link building, guest posting, PR and other SEO essentials in each market.
• Translation style guide: Before you start physically translating any content, create a translation style guide to maintain consistency across your online presence.

Building a multilingual website

Now, we come to the stage of actually building a multilingual website and SEO translation crosses borders with localisation and web development. This will broaden the scope of your global marketing strategy.

Professional translation: Having your content correctly translated and localized.

• Web code localisation: Your code needs to be structured so that you can make changes to your website centrally and be able to add new website versions without breaking the initial code, edit language files and maintain your sites in the most efficient way.
• Language selection: How you implement language selection is important. You can use geotargeting to deliver languages based on your choice of target locations.
• Content localisation:  Localise your content strategy to cater for the unique interests of each audience and create unique content to match in their own language.
• Multilingual content promotion: Your content needs to be promoted on the right language and platforms for each market.
• Resource translation: Key resources like user guides need to be translated and localised for specific markets.

With your multilingual website being functional, your attention now turns to maintaining it for the best performance. The SEO essentials you need to consider about for foreign language websites.

• Hreflang tags: This tells Google which language your page is in so it can deliver the right version to each language speaker.
• Page speed: Loading times are necessary(especially on mobile, which is the only online access many people have in certain markets).
• Server locations: The further users are away from your servers, the longer it takes pages to load.
• CDNs & caching: To overcome the server location problem, use a content delivery network to “borrow” local servers and implement caching to improve loading times for people who have already visited your site before.
• Internal links: Make sure internal links always point to pages in the same language.
• Link audits: Make sure incoming links are from websites in the same language and remove unnecessary links.
• Anchor text: Use SEO translators to help determine the best text for links on your website.