By having a website with products or service information is not enough because what is the use of that website if it doesn’t get any visitors. In order to elaborate your international business, you would need more than an English website. Main reason is being a website is not a website without any visitors – it is just like a vacant apartment. Now-a-days many web marketers know the basic strategy to bring traffic via SEO.
People usually browse the website which is in their own language. It is not necessarily true that if a website is in English it would be good. There are more than 70% of world’s population who visit own language websites. While people who want to buy products or tryout services from websites they do it from websites in their language. This is true and you have to cope with it. You probably have to do a lot of work to pitch for a product or sales to a guy who doesn’t speak English but understand a little.
Now you may have an in idea to put a translation page on your website which can translate the information into many different languages. This is probably not a very good idea because there are few things that you need to be careful while doing multilingual SEO.
We will just discuss important things that you should do and shouldn’t do.
Things that you want to do
• Google and beyond
Of course, Google is the King that brings 70% of visitors to any websites but if you are going to connect with the world you have go think of the remaining 30% of total visitors. Therefore you got to submit your website in other Local Search Engines beside Google.
• Language Versatility
English spoken in many countries are not always same. There are differences like using vocabulary, punctuation, slang, spellings and other differences. For example, US English and UK English are different and they even have different spellings for many words. You have to understand this aspect and plan accordingly.
• Country specific domains
Websites which have localized domains do pretty well in rankings. That is, a domain name ends with particular country code. The maintaining cost for this type of website requires little more investment than normal websites but it is really worth it because the revenue that could bring from these domains are pretty higher in the long run.
• Analyzing competitors
It’s business world and of course you will have tons of competitions. Whether the competitors are from local or international, you’ll need to analyze them so you can have more powerful and effect plans to beat them for the same keywords.
• Build links that are local
Link building is yet another vital aspect of SEO. When you are developing link building just make sure that you get quality links which will make your ranking go high in the local Search Engines both locally and globally.
Things that you don’t want to do:
• Translate keywords directly
There are probably lots of good tools that translate the language but it is better to get someone who speaks good language and who can translate the language to desired language conveniently and properly.
• Multilingual content on a single page
It is bad to put multilingual content on a single page because this could confuses Googlebot as well as users. Therefore it is better to keep single language at one time at one page because this will have better affect in Search Engines. If you want to put something multilingual page then create the local version with local content separately.
• Bad analysis of Keywords
Things could go very wrong if you don’t adequately analyze your targeted keywords then many things could go wrong. Don’t try to change the keywords if you think of translating them into your own language.
Multilingual SEO is about researching and applying adequate methods to get positive results. If you have a website maintained in foreign language, it can connect to your desired audience and your website could become very popular. It only needs little resource and SEO work to establish this connection.
