Customer Acquisition and your Multilingual Site: Localisation and SEO
English may be the language that’s most used to communicate on the Internet (an estimated 872 million and above, followed by Chinese-speaking and Spanish-speaking users)* but there are literally thousands of other languages in the world and, if their product or service is right for their market, users near and afar who speak a different language to your local tongue could be your business’s next potential customers. Perhaps you or your company have already tried to translate your website or app into several other languages and did your best to make it look like your main website or product. However, have you thought about the actual process of attracting these potentially new customers to the translated version of your website that you’ve been working hard on? Have you noticed a change in the audience acquisition and how users arrive on your page? If you have not worked on localizing your website properly and forgot about localized SEO, you probably have not noticed any changes.
When localizing your website, you not only have to translate it, adapt it to your new potential customer and its region and factor in the user experience, but you also have to adapt much of the « behind-the-scenes » of your website that’s available to search engines: from file names to page titles and keywords. This is even more important when you are not planning on having a new domain (.fr/.it/.ru/.au etc…) for the translated version of your website and want to keep it on your main domain (fr.yourdomain.com).
If you want to fully exploit market opportunities, you need an SEO strategy that can be tweaked to apply to all versions of your website. If your customers can read your website in its native language, that is great, but first they have to find your website.
Here are 5 SEO tips to improve the localization of your website:
Keywords and meta descriptions
It is important to have a list of all of the pages you want to localise and have on your translated version of the website. and prepare keywords and meta descriptions for each of them. This is not only translating the ones you already have but also researching the target market (search volumes, keyword competitiveness…) to be sure you are using the right keywords to attract customers from that region.
Titles
Do not forget to translate your titles and pages as well, this is going to help search engines to rank your website and is also going to show potential customers that you really made an effort and they can trust you. Not only do they want to be able to read your website, they also want to make sure that your website is safe.
Images
Not only do you need to localize the images on your website, you also need to localize files names. For example, let’s say you are selling brushes and painting products and one of the images of a product displayed on your website is called « brush_set_sale_2016.png » and you kept this both as the name and description of the file. In terms of SEO, the search engines are going to show this image if an English-speaking customer is looking for the kind of products you are selling. But what if a potential French-speaking customer is also looking for your product? They are not going to type these words into their search engine, and because the file name has not been adapted, your image won’t show up in their results.
Glossary
This applies both for your website localization and SEO. Whenever you are developing new versions of your website, keeping a glossary comes in handy when there are small changes to make, problems to fix or if a customer contacts your support center using their native language.
URLs or domains
I mentioned above that you do not have to go for a brand new domain with the region extension of your potential customers (.fr/.it/…) if you do not want to. However, it is important to integrate some sort of clue in your URLs for your customers to understand on what page they are going to land. For example, http://fr.yourwebsite.com or http://yourwebsite.com/fr
These basic tips can help your user acquisition increase and get the right customers onto your website. Localization might be a way to talk your customer’s language but localized SEO is a way to get on search engines all around the world. So if you want your potential customers to visit your website, you probably should be making sure that your website is ranked on search engines the best way possible.
You can check how your website is currently doing in terms of SEO thanks to many free SEO online tools e.g. SEO Site Checkup (unaffiliated with Visionär).
*Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm