Multilingual SEO

A business wants to be seen; it wants to grow its audience and become a well-known brand, not just in its own country but all around the world. Many businesses will agree that a goal each and every year is to be bigger than it was last year. Even when you have found success in your own country, there is no reason why you can’t do well in another and expand your brand internationally. You will find that there will always be people out there who will be interested in your brand; they just need to be able to find you. How do you do this?

You need to become more visible online.

However, growing your online presence not just in your country but all over the world will require a more in-depth insight into your managed SEO campaigns. With a managed SEO campaign, you will have already found success in increasing your traffic through link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs., PPC and auditing, for example, but did you know that it was possible to expand your reach even further with multilingual SEO?

What is multilingual SEO?

When you want your brand to go international, you will require your SEO campaigns to be taken further. Multilingual SEO is about optimising your content for different languages for countries all around the world. If you want to make sales in another country, you need to be able to boost your ranking on the SERPs and provide them with a webpage that they can read and understand. There is no point directing traffic to your website if the audience can’t read the English content. You should always put the customers at the forefront, and this can be achieved with an SEO strategy for multiple locations.

Why is it worth implementing?

Unlike the SEO strategy that you might be currently implementing, your content is likely only optimised for one language. However, making your site available in another language, or several if you wanted, depending on your goals, you will not only be able to expand your audience potentially, but you will also improve your chances of ranking highly for a specific region in several languages. If you want to find success, you should implement an SEO strategy for multiple locations that explores the following:

In-depth keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. and market research

Just as with the standard SEO strategy, you need to ensure that in-depth keyword and market research is conducted, no matter the language. You need to know what people are searching for in order to successfully target them. This can only be achieved with keyword and market research. It is the foundation of any SEO location strategy.

It is important to note that you must not assume what you are ranking for currently in the UK will be the same in another country. This is why research is of the utmost importance.

Creating content for multilingual link building

Link building is at the heart of a content marketing strategy, so when you are looking to expand internationally, it makes sense that the multilingual link building is included. Multilingual link building works in a similar way to link building. You will have high-authority domain sites that will be acquired through blogger outreach. The big difference here is that the sites will not be UK or US-based, rather it will be the country you are deciding to expand to. The domains that you select will have to be from the country you are targeting; this could be France, Germany, Norway, Canada or even Sweden, for example.

Once you have your chosen domain, you will create content around the keyword that is ranking (making sure it is in the appropriate language). When creating the content, you need to understand the audience and the language they speak. Many people find that working with a native speaker is the best route to take to produce high-quality content, as it is more accurate.

Remember, the more high-quality your content is, the more you will be able to keep your audience on your website. If you have a poorly translated piece of content that is riddled with basic spelling and grammar mistakes, Google will not accept it and neither will your audience; you will find that your reputation will be affected and so too will your ranking on the SERPs.

Build pages for locations

A big mistake that many companies make when they are expanding is not creating additional pages for their website that apply to the different locations they are targeting. A page that is clearly aimed at a UK audience is not going to seem relevant to somebody half-way across the world in Sweden. They will click off your website and go elsewhere, and find a site that is closer to home. However, you can avoid this by creating pages for each of the locations that you are expanding to. This means translating any content you have into the relevant language to intice the lead in further.

However, it is no longer good enough to just produce one page with the list of locations that you serve; you need to have individual pages that are detailed and relevant to the place you are targeting, from the style of language to the relevant keywords used. Your location pages SEO campaign is more important than ever if you want to succeed.

Without a multi location website that makes the pages relevant to the country you are targeting, you will struggle to make the impact you were hoping for.

Different SERPs

Google may be a popular search engine in the US and UK, but in China, Baidu is the popular choice, whereas in Russia, they are known to use Yandex. This means you need to make sure that if you are targeting countries such as these that you are considering optimising your content to fit the algorithms of these SERPs too.

Mobile and voice search

Mobile and voice search is becoming a big part of any SEO campaign as more and more people are turning to their handheld devices to find out answers to their questions. Jumping on board with this early on and optimising your mobile and voice search for all languages will boost the chances of you ranking for long-tail keywords as well as increasing your chances of taking position zero with a featured snippetA featured snippet is a search result that is specially formatted to include a summary of the answer, extracted from a web page..

It is quite simple. If you want to go international, you need to embrace mobile SEOMobile SEO is a term used to describe the optimization of a website to suit the needs of mobile devices. and do so quickly.

Implementing a multi location SEO strategy will require you to pay careful attention to the technical aspects, more so than with your current SEO, but if done well, you could find your business manages to reach global status sooner than you think.