As a small business owner, you may have the ambition of expanding your reach beyond your national borders. You want to tap into local markets and potential customers who share their native languages with you. If that is indeed the case, then it’s time to face the reality: multilingual SEO isn’t easy! But it can be done if you follow these tips from start to finish:
To make sure your content is SEO-friendly in multiple languages, you need to have a consistent and thorough translation process in place. This means translating the text, images and video files that you want to share on social media or publish online–and then reviewing it all for accuracy, readability and search engine optimization (SEO).
Once you’ve done all that, it’s time to optimize your site. You want to make sure that your content is optimized for the search engines that people in each country use. If a user searches for “hotels in Madrid” on Google Spain, they will get different results than if they searched for the same thing on Google US or UK–and so should you!
It can be tricky to figure out which keywords are most popular in each country, but luckily there are tools available online that can help:
- Use a translation tool like Google Translate or Unbabel (which also offers human translation) to make sure that your translated content is accurate before publishing it on your website or blog.
- Check for duplicate content by using Moz Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs Site explorer–this will ensure there aren’t any duplicates across languages when translating pages into foreign languages; otherwise this could lead to lower rankings and lost traffic from search engines as well as potential penalties from Google due to duplicate content violations!
The first thing to do is make sure your content is relevant to the country you are targeting. The second step is to use local language and slang, as well as business names and addresses. Linking up with local directories, social media accounts and blogs will help you build a stronger presence in that country too. Make sure that you’re using images, videos or maps which are specific to each location too!
You monitor Google Search Console results, and check if there are any issues with crawling and indexing of your multilingual pages.
Google Search Console is a free tool that you can use to monitor your website. It provides a lot of information about how well your site performs in Google search results (SEO), including:
- crawl errors on the site;
- traffic from Google;
- links pointing at the site;
- content changes made on the site etc.
International link building strategy
In order to build links internationally, you must first create a multilingual link building strategy. This can include guest posts on foreign websites and cross-linking with authoritative domains in each country where you operate.
For example, say that you are an American company that sells products online in the United States and Canada. You would want to find websites based in both countries that are relevant for your business and reach out to them with a pitch about publishing a guest post by one of your employees or partners on their website. The goal here is not only to secure a backlink from another website but also increase brand awareness among consumers who visit these sites regularly looking for information about what types of products best suit their needs–which could lead them back towards yours!
You do all the above, plus more!
If you want to be successful in multilingual SEO, you need to be aware of cultural differences. You also need to make sure that your website is optimized for each country. Finally, if your website is only available in one language (e.g., English), then it should be multilingual so that people who don’t speak English can still access it easily.
If you want to reach customers all over the world, you will need to do some work!
- You will need to build a process. This includes creating or updating your website, adding international versions of your content (if it’s not already there), and building links from other sites in those languages.
- You also need to optimize for each country: what are their search habits? How does Google display results differently from one country to another? What language is used on social media in each market segment? These questions can help shape your strategy as well as inform which tools and platforms are best suited for tracking performance across multiple markets.
- Link building strategies vary greatly depending on where you’re targeting traffic from–and how competitive those markets are–so researching this aspect early on is key before devoting resources towards outreach efforts later down the line once traffic levels start increasing organically due to SEO efforts being put into place earlier on during launch phase.