A lot of the web’s best content and websites are in English. However, there’s a lot more to the internet than those sites. In fact, some of the biggest social media platforms and e-commerce sites in the world barely use English at all.
The more languages you add to your website, the more people you can reach. Including Spanish gives you access to an audience of about 437 million people, and that’s just one example. Italian will let you connect with about 63 million users, Korean enables you to communicate with over 75 million, and so on.
It’s important to understand, though, that merely translating your website isn’t enough to increase traffic. If you want to get access to those audiences, you need to take Search Engine Optimization (SEO) into account as well. That means translating your pages’ metadata, targeting keywords that you might not have considered for your site’s original language, making it easy to switch between different versions of your website, and much more.
Translating your website into even a single additional language is a big leap. With the right plugin, the process becomes much simpler, but it still takes time to localize every aspect of your site. The more complex your site is, the more work this entails. So you’ll want to make sure you get to reap the rewards of your efforts, and that can come down to proper SEO.
Take advantage of Multiple Languages SEO today!
The more languages you add to your website, the bigger your potential audience becomes. Even translating your site into one other language is a fantastic step. It’s important to remember, however, that translating your content is only the start – you also have to think about multilingual SEO.
If you want to tackle SEO for multiple languages, here are five tips to keep in mind:
Translate your URLs.
Use hreflang tags.
Translate your metadata.
Review your keyword usage.
Research popular keywords in other languages.
One element a lot of people overlook when translating their websites is URLs. For example, if you translate your ‘shop’ page, and its URL is currently yourwebsite.com/shop, it should appear as yourwebsite.com/tienda when someone browses the Spanish version of your site.
The easiest way to do this is to modify the ‘slug’ for each page you translate. By slug, we mean the identifier for the page that comes after the domain name. In the two examples we mentioned above, the slugs would be “shop” and “tienda” respectively.
hreflang tags are snippets of code that tell search engines what language you’re using on each page. They’re a must for websites that have multiple languages, since they help Google and other search engines differentiate between each version of your content.
Adding these tags to your pages is simple, and there are several ways you can go about it. However, it can be rather time-consuming to edit the code for each page on your website individually, particularly if you’re going to translate it into multiple languages.
For every page on your website, there are a lot of elements that visitors can’t see because they’re meant for search engines only. That collection of elements is called ‘metadata,’ and it encompasses everything from meta descriptions to tags and image alt text.
Translating your website’s metadata is perhaps the most important thing you can do to bring in more traffic from users in other languages. Without that metadata, it’s unlikely that your pages will rank highly in languages other than English.
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