Multilingual SEO Tips

Shock, horror – News Flash! The entire world does not always operate in the English language!

Many people work within a small mind frame where they think that everyone worth aiming their business at knows English but this is a really bad mistake to make. While many people do speak and read English, there are many people that don’t and many more who don’t speak or read it as their first language and optimizing a website for these people gives you a really wide spectrum of possible customers!

Popular Languages…

Many people in the US speak Spanish as their number one language especially in areas such as Miami and LA. Almost the entire South American continent primarily speak Spanish along with some countries in the Caribbean, Central America, Mexico and of course – Spain itself!

In Belgium and some parts of Switzerland as well as France, Canada and the majority of Africa, French is the most common language. Germany is another popular language as residents of Switzerland and Austria speak German as well as Germany itself.

Italian and Portuguese are also commonly spoken around the world and with all of these different languages widely spoken all over the globe; why does everyone focus their SEO mainly on English? While many people who speak other languages do also speak English, as English is not their primary language it makes sense that you would want to optimize a website to people using their mother tongue.

Non-English Optimization

Optimizing for a non-English website is done in exactly the same way as you would optimize an English website. The keyword research is the same and the application of links and keywords/phrases is identical. However, you don’t simply translate the English version of a keyword into Spanish or French. Popular keywords in English may come in three or four different terms but in French just in one or there may be several search terms in German but just one in English. This is what makes multilingual SEO tricky!

Search sample sizes are also far smaller for any language other than English and this makes the task even more testing. Where there is little data to go on, webpages must be optimized for various words and phrases in order to cover all angles. Once a website has been optimized for the keywords, just as with an English website it is time to begin building up the links. This can also be problematic as there are far fewer non-English websites to swap links with as well as fewer directories and article banks. However, to counter balance this problem, you need fewer links in your SEO as there is less competition!

The best way to get a website optimized in another language is to firstly use a professional translation service so that you can be sure that your website reads properly in the target language. Many marketing companies offer a translation service as part of their multilingual SEO services, which should be made full use of!

How did you do your multilingual SEO?