Multilingual SEO: what it is and why it matters
A multilingual site is a website that offers the same content, in multiple languages. The most common reason why a multilingual site is created is a company's need to reach as many customers who speak different languages.
Translating the website is also an effective strategy for optimizing SEO, but obviously it is necessary to define a good multilingual SEO strategy to better index and position the multilingual site. Let's find out together what it means Multilingual SEO and why you should invest the time in making it.
What does multilingual SEO mean?
Multilingual SEO consists ofoptimize the contents of your website in different languages, making it searchable in new markets and allowing people from different countries to find your website through organic search.
SEO is the English acronym for “Search Engine Optimization”, that is to say “optimization for search engines”. It is important to make one good SEO strategy, then to organize your web page to ensure that Google understands the contents you offer in the best possible way, and rewards you by positioning your multilingual site among the first searches.
The difference between SEO and multilingual SEO is that the latter is done on multilingual sites and then replicated in each reference language. It is important to do it because in this way the website is positioned not only for the Italian target, but also for targets who speak other languages.
Why create a multilingual SEO strategy
If you have a business that also speaks abroad, in addition to creating a good multilingual site, it is essential to position it well on search engines. For this reason it is important to invest time, and money, to create a good multilingual SEO strategy.
Having good multilingual SEO is essential for place a website on search engines in several languages. The main purpose of a good multilingual SEO is to increase visits to a website, coming not only from one's own country, but from all over the world. A multilingual site is not simply translated into other languages in the same shape and size, it is in fact necessary to target the site to users in a specific country to improve ranking in that specific country.
To make a multilingual SEO effective, therefore, it is not enough to limit yourself to the literal translation of the site: it is important that each content of your web page is modeled according to the characteristics of the target to make it functional and usable by users in their original language.
Multilingual SEO: the most common mistakes
Some mistakes that are made during the creation of a multilingual SEO, even if trivial, can create various problems for a site in terms of traffic and positioning on the net.
In fact, if your multilingual site doesn't have good SEO, and therefore a good organization that allows search engines to highlight your web page, your market could be viewed by a small number of users. But what are the most common mistakes? Here are some listed.
Don't study the digital market
The most common mistake companies make when they want to make their website international is not studying the digital market. In fact, SEO work differs from country to country based on their characteristics. For example, using English for all countries is a frequent mistake in businesses approaching this field.
Do not use different URLs for each site language
Each language you add to your multilingual site corresponds to a specification URLs, for example, the English version of the site will be under the "en" folder, while the French version under the "fr" folder.
Not dividing the various languages into "folders" can lead to many errors in terms of indexing and positioning since the Google crawler could index and position content written in French for the wrong market.
Only use automatic translators to create multilingual SEO
To translate the contents of a website you can rely on translation plugins that perform an automatic translation. Some plugins also offer functionality related to multilingual SEO management. However, it is important not only to rely on automatic translation, but to intervene manually to perfect the translation.
A monolingual site will have its SEO strategy defined for that language, the translation plugins translate all the elements of the SEO (keyword, title, meta description, alt text) into the defined languages, but it is important to intervene manually to evaluate if the translation corresponds to the SEO strategy defined for each language. For example, one of the fundamental steps for a good multilingual SEO is to carry out a keywords analysis for each of the site's languages, avoiding a simple translation of the keywords identified for one of the sample countries. If a careful analysis of keywords and search volumes is not carried out, there is the risk of responding partially to the search intent of users.
Use multilingual SEO
In conclusion, if you want to attract a broader customer base, it is important to have one multilingual site well positioned on search engines, and to achieve it you need a good multilingual SEO.
In this article we have explained to you what multilingual SEO is and its relevance on websites. You just have to apply our advice, but don't forget the most frequent mistakes that can be made.
