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EDMF-Translation-Interpreting-Language-Services-Lokalisation and SEO-3 Flags

How to improve your international SEO strategy? – Part 3

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As promised in our earlier articles, we now continue our analysis of the importance and benefits of localisation and SEO translation.

A company that is growing around the world has an increasing number of international requirements to satisfy. How can it create a global website for this? Should it keep an existing one, or create localised versions?

Here are a few tips to improving your international SEO strategy.

Know your target audience

The majority of web users do not speak English. The quality of your translation, localisation and international SEO strategy determines whether or not you will win business.  Know your audience’s language, slang, concerns and everything they prioritise.

Quality translation

Improving international SEO depends heavily on the quality of the translated web pages. Despite dedicating a lot of time to planning and reviewing translations, leaving the actual job to machines will likely result in localisation errors. Efficient and quality translation requires more than just loading words into a software programme, which focuses just on their literal sense.  Involving human expertise in the translation process is very important. This is the only way to ensure proper syntax, meaning and consistency in your translated content.

Optimising keywords

Anyone visiting your website does so via regional search engines (Facebook pages, Twitter hashtags, etc.). Different audiences find your company in different ways, so you are best advised to use the most appropriate keywords and expressions. After compiling your list of keywords and expressions, you can integrate them into your online content, and use them in the meta data.

Use country-specific domains (hu, co.uk, fr). As you would like to expand your company on an international scale, it is worth buying the upper-level domain names for the individual regions where your web pages will run. This is probably the most effective way of being able to optimise a website for an international audience, whilst making sure that the target audience can actually find it. The audience understands the suffixes of the given country, and the domain conveys the information that the website will be understandable for them. The search engines rank these websites in higher positions for the audiences in these countries.

Of course, this not a one size fits all scenario, multilingual websites can be created in many different ways, and what you ultimately choose depends on your given situation.

Localisation and multilingual SEO are not easy to blend either, and if you take the wrong path this can cost you time and money. That said it is important that you know all of the options out there in order to make an informed choice.

Fact is that multilingual online content helps companies grow and be competitive. Optimising and localising websites as well as SEO are key parts of this. This is all impossible without quality translation.

An experienced translation agency saves you the hassle of addressing these problems as it is capable of blending these aspects into the translation process for your website.

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EDMF-Translation-Interpreting-Language-Services-Lokalisation and SEO-2

Localisation and SEO translation Why do you need a bilingual website? Part 2

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As promised in our earlier article, we now continue our analysis of the importance and benefits of localisation and SEO translation.

A company that is growing around the world has an increasing number of international requirements to satisfy. How can it create a global website for this? Should it keep an existing one, or create localised versions?

Localisation and SEO translation: how to improve your global web presence

The success of every company’s website is determined by its SEO. Namely, where it appears in the list of search results. Regardless whether we are talking about a local or an international website. The higher you appear in the search engine listing, the better chance you stand of people reaching your website. The main challenge with international SEO is selecting the SEO strategies that suit the given regions, cultural norms and and languages.

Many surprisingly believe that localisation and SEO translation are one and the same thing. While they complement each other, the difference between localisation and SEO is not as nuanced as you may think.

Both are types of translation, but they have completely different objectives.

A good translator should of course be capable of blending both approaches, but most just focus on localisation

Localisation and SEO translation: what’s the difference?

Localisation translates web pages for a different culture, aligning them to the linguistic and cultural norms of the target audience in the other society.

The mistranslation of a slogan can even be quite damaging…

Many of you will certainly have heard of HSBC, the global financial institution. In 2009, HSBC had to launch a rebranding campaign worth an estimated USD 10 million to repair the damage from a previous campaign. This was due to its catchphrase “Assume Nothing” being mistakenly translated as “Do Nothing” in some countries where the bank operated.

 

And of course there are cases when a brand is a huge success in one language, but a catastrophe in the other…

One awkward example was when Colgate launched one of its popular brands in France under the name Cue. Regrettably, they disregarded a small but important detail. In France, Cue was the name of a widely known and extremely popular porn magazine.

 

A good translator avoids these pitfalls because they not only know the target language well, but also the target culture, and they can immediately identify expressions and situations that are entertaining in the target language, or simply awkward. So localisation means translating a text in a way that also makes it appealing and enjoyable for readers in the foreign language.

Localisation vs SEO translation: different genre, different goal

SEO translation is a completely different genre. This is because the main objective here is not to find readers, but to catch the attention of the search engines. All of the key words, expressions, titles, labels, anchors, script messages and attributes have to be translated in a way that makes the page appealing for the search engines in the target language too. This means if someone is searching in a foreign language for a product or service that your website offers, then it will appear at the top of all the search engines. If it does well on a market in a given language, then a good SEO translation means it will do well on another market too.

Of course, a SEO translation alone is not enough. If the localisation is poor, visitors will quickly find the page, but will be just as quick in leaving it again. It’s possible readers will get a good laugh if they see a funny translation, but it’s unlikely you will get a lot of customers this way.

So an excellent website translator has to be good at both localisation and SEO translation, since they have to be able to blend effective sales with human customers, and thus sell your product or service to potential customers by means of the search engine optimisation. Few translators are able to strike this delicate balance. This is why web designers very often ask for translations from those who are localisation professionals, before finding SEO specialists in the target language who optimise the translated pages. Of course this can be considerably more expensive than an average translation, but it opens up new markets that previously were inaccessible, and you avoid customers coming across mistakes on your website like inactive banks or pornographic toothpaste.

Are you looking for this kind of business model?

A good translation agency spares you these problems, as it is capable of combining all these aspects during a website translation.

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EDMF Translations - multilingual websites

Why does your company need a multilingual website?

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 Sixty-three percent of global brands reach more clients after increasing the number of languages available on their website

Facts – Most of the world’s largest websites offer more than one language, generally two, but some even have a hundred languages. Sixty-three percent of global brands reach more clients after increasing the number of languages available on their website. Why? Because investing in languages helps enterprises to grow and enhances their competitiveness (as confirmed by CSA Research). Unfortunately, this is a message still to reach 37% of the world’s leading brands.

Has it reached you yet?

EDMF Translations - multilingual websites

Multilingual online content: English and Russian the leading languages

Demand for online content in more than one language has risen dramatically nowadays. Currently, 53.6% of websites are in English. The next most popular language is Russian, at 6.4%.
This leaves millions of web users on the outside, unable to read a large part of online content because they don’t understand the language. This of course is exploited to the full by those who speak English.
And even if someone does speak English, there are many different levels of fluency. Most people prefer to handle their business activities in their native tongue. The demand for translated content is only going to grow in future with the rise in online users, especially in China and India.

Multilingual SEO – the Google example

And there’s more. Translating online content is a great thing to do, but what is it worth if people cannot find it? Does it matter if your website appears on Google’s first search page in English if you are targeting other languages? This is where multilingual SEO comes into play, which is more than just keywords. Multilingual SEO is vital nowadays for people to find your company.

Mobile optimisation

Alongside improving your website it is vital to optimise the content for mobile devices. Today it is often true that more people browse sites on their mobile phones. This goes beyond even multilingual websites. According to the International Data Corporation, 3.2 billion people will be able to access the internet this year, and more than 2 billion of these online users will be on mobile devices. This is why it is worthwhile ensuring your website can be accessed properly on mobile devices and tablets.