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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 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.