Do you want your website to be one of the first to appear on search engine results pages?
Follow these 4 steps and you'll be closer to mastering your multilingual SEO strategy.
1. Choose your URL structure
The three best options are:
Domain- yourcompany.com
Advantages: Makes it easy to separate websites, and enables clear geographic segmentation.
Disadvantages: May have limited availability and require more infrastructure.
Subdomains- en.yourcompany.com
Advantages: Allows the use of different servers, and makes it easy to separate websites and track the statistics of each website with tools such as Google Analytics.
Disadvantages: Can make it difficult to recognize geographic targeting from the URL (the user may not know if “pt” refers to the language or the country).
Subdirectories - yourcompany.com/en
Advantages: Low maintenance and easy to set up.
Disadvantages: Websites cannot be hosted on separate servers, and it is harder to recognize geographic segmentation from the URL.
To facilitate interaction between search engines, you should be consistent and use the same structure for all versions of your website in foreign languages.
2. Don't just translate, localize your content
If you create a multilingual website for a different target audience, will a literal translation of the content be enough? Will the keywords you use be the same for another country?
Each country has its own needs, trends, culture and language, so the way you are communicating now may not be the most appropriate for another country. So, you need to adapt your website's content.
How? Get professional translators who are native speakers of the language you want to translate into, who can ensure that the content is rewritten and adapted to the target audience.
- Don't forget to translate page titles, descriptions, keywords, image descriptions, and page URLs.
3. Avoid duplicate content and implement Hreflang tags
The Hrflang tag is a website management element that allows you to characterise your website as a page translated into a specific language. That is, instead of considering that you have duplicate pages on your website, a situation that would rank your site lower in search engine results, Google will recognize that you have pages optimised for users in different regions and languages. Thus, by implementing hrflang tags, you will increase your ranking on the country-specific search pages in question.
4. Tailor your keywords to each target market
As with your website's content, simply providing a literal translation of the keywords you currently use is not enough, because keywords for one country are not always the same important for another. This is why you need to re-search keywords for the target country and determine which search terms are most commonly used. The second step will be to adapt the content, as you have done on your original website, to use the relevant keywords (this adjustment will be easier for content that has been localized and not simply translated).
It is important to follow these steps to ensure that your website appears at the top of search results, regardless of the country.
So, don't forget:
Optimise your multilingual SEO strategy, improve the consumer experience in all translated versions and use professional translators to help you with all the steps above. This is the only way you can ensure that the translated content conveys the message you want, taking into account the cultural context of the country to which it is addressed
