3 essential tips for SEO success on your multilingual website

Natural referencing, better known by its English name SEO (Search Engine Optimization), is a complex discipline central to all strategies. All businesses want their website to appear at the top of search engine results pages. This issue becomes even more complicated when needing to combine translation services and SEO optimization. 

But don’t panic, our team has 3 essential tips to help you combine the two disciplines easily! 

Do you want to optimise your position on search engines regardless of the country you are targeting? Of course you do! To achieve this, you need to adapt your site’s SEO strategy to the target country, to guarantee quality SEO in all the languages available on your website. 

Here are 3 tips that you may find useful.

1- Avoid literal translation

Translation is more than simply translating content word for word. The meaning of the document as a whole, whatever the text type (written text, video, etc.), must be taken into account. It is important to maintain your business universe, your general message and your brand image for each of the target countries that you would like to reach.  

Translating involves ensuring both the quality of the linguistic elements (for example, the syntax) and that the content will appeal to the target audience. It is also highly recommended to have proficient knowledge of the field (legal, political, economic, fashion, education, etc.) in order to use and understand the appropriate, and often technical, vocabulary. 

More importantly, this helps the translator to approach the content with an analytical and critical eye. If all of these requirements are fulfilled, a good translation is guaranteed, and that’s exactly what your target audience needs! 

2- Promote localization and SEO

Localization is a translation style that allows you to tailor your content to your audience perfectly. It takes into account the culture of the target country. It entails culturally and linguistically adapting the content, so that it will interest your audience and they will identify with it. This technique allows you to reach your target audience more effectively and, therefore, create a better impact. 

Above all, the quality of the translation must be impeccable, and the words must be chosen carefully according to the socio-cultural context of the target country. 

It’s impossible to talk about SEO without talking about content! You must always provide useful and relevant content. As a result, your multilingual website referencing will be optimised. 

A few pointers on the number of words: 

● Your article must contain a minimum of 600 words and a maximum of 1,000 words. 

● However, if you are writing content for a very strategic page (the home page, for example), it is better to write only 500 to 600 words. 

● Finally, for a product page, it is advisable to write 300 to 400 words. 

Apply the 1% rule: use a keyword, every 100 words, which helps you to formulate your content in a simple and relevant way for Internet users. 

Don’t forget the important tags (meta, Hn). But what exactly are they?  

●Meta tags are found in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and are used for the title and the description. The most relevant keywords must be highlighted in the title and the description.  

● Hn tags, in contrast, are found directly within your content. There are 6 HTML tags: 

1. For Google, the most important tag is the H1, which represents your title. It is recommended for your title to be 60 characters long (this is the optimum length). It must include your most relevant keyword.
2. The H2 and H3 tags are used for the subtitles that allow you to structure your content. They also give you the chance to add other keywords.
3. Finally, the H4, H5 and H6 tags are used very often, except in long texts in order to add space using margins in particular.

However, be careful not to misuse tags, which could cause search engines to classify it as spam.  

After choosing attention-grabbing and catchy titles, you must write unique, high-quality content, which is consistent with your business and your audience. We also recommend that you give your images a descriptive title, and insert internal and external links in your content: they are extremely effective for your SEO strategy. 

3- Adopt a multilingual website structure

When your site is available in different languages, its should be organised clearly. 

Firstly, you must use several domain names;the extension will be different depending on the target country.   

Next, you can add tags so that the search engines suggest the page directly in the language that corresponds to the internet user’s country. 

In addition, you need to tailor the key information to each of your target countries. For example, change the currency (euros, dollars), change the unit of measurement (kilometer, mile) and the dialling code. Apply these rules to achieve successful SEO on your multilingual website. 

Finally, do not use a machine translation tool (Google translation, translator, etc.) but get in touch with a translation agency. At Intertranslations, we specialize in SEO and translation of multilingual websites. Do not hesitate to contact us to get your free quote.

Finally, as you do for all your marketing campaigns, we encourage you to monitor and analyse your results in order to determine whether or not to fine-tune your SEO strategy. 

If you apply our three valuable tips, we are confident that your multilingual site will rank among the best SERP results! 

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