When you’re venturing into a multilingual and multiregional domain, rest assured you’ve reached the advanced level of your SEO game.
The website you’re optimizing for is huge and complex since it caters to the audience beyond your locality, most probably on an international level.
Whatever your website is about, you could still use multilingual and multiregional optimization to acquire a ginormous jump in traffic.
Not many people in your targeted international market speak English, so if you want your message to reach them, convey it in their language.
Is there a Difference between Multilingual and Multiregional SEO?
A multilingual website offers the same content, but in a different language. On the other hand, a multiregional website is tailored to people from varying geographical locations, providing unique experience and region-relevant content, service, and product.
With multiregional proffering superior experience to visitors from various regions, multinational e-commerce stores usually opt for it.
Here are a few strategies you could implement, which can guarantee victory in SEO for different languages and countries.
Where to Begin?
While optimizing for multilingual SEO, the tactics are pretty much the same as they are with the SEO in your native language. That is searching keywords, writing SEO-optimize content, and increasing traffic via affiliate, email, or social media marketing. For multilingual, all these activities will be specific to the targeted language.
1. Draw a Road-map
Before you embark on expanding your website’s horizon, you ought to design a strategy whether you want to go for multilingual, multiregional, or both.
Begin with determining where the majority of your site’s traffic comes from. If a huge chunk of your audience belongs to a specific country or speak a certain language in your locality, you now know where to begin.
You can easily find that information via Google Analytics. Go to Audience and choose ‘Geo’ on the menu. Now with Language and Location options available, analyze your traffic segments.
2. Place an Indicator for URLs
The danger of a multilingual site is duplicate content as Google penalizes duplicate content that appears within multiple URLs. So to avoid such a situation, Google suggests that you employ ‘dedicated URLs,’ which entail a language indicator.
Via this indicator, your users and search engine both can determine the site language from a URL such as the master page might be www.spectrum.com, and the Spanish version might be www.spectrum.es.
3. Take Care of Metadata
Your meta titles and descriptions are a cardinal factor in ranking your site on the SERP. When your site content is translated, it’s obvious that the metadata will be translated as well. However, it’s not as straightforward with the meta.
The keywords in your standard language might be entirely different in your targeted language, which requires keyword research in your newly targeted language or region.
For example, your keyword in the original language is Spectrum near me; however, another language’s phrasing may be entirely different or the keyword phrase may not be popular in another language or locality.
The best tools for keyword research are Google Ads Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, Keyword Tool.io, and Ubersuggests.
4. hreflang Tags
Google makes use of hreflang tag attributes to find out the targeted language, region or both of the page.
You can submit these tags through the sitemap or include them in the header section of the original page. A page aiming for multiple regions could have several hreflang tags.
An example of hreflang attribute utilized for Spanish readers in the US :
5. Dedicated Language for Each Page
Unless your site is a forum, where you encourage user-generated content in multiple languages, avoid cramming a single page with more than one language.
A page with patches of different languages can negatively affect user experience with its confusing navigation and contexts.
In certain cases, the strategy may prove to be useful such as side-by-side translations on a language-learning platform.
Moreover, when you do employ different languages on one page, a hreflang tag or multiple tags for that matter can help identify the intended language and region of that page.
Final Note
Maintaining multiple sites in different languages can often prove to be unprofitable and a huge hassle.
When you’ve different products and services tailored for each country, go for multinational content. On the other hand, when your services are similar across the globe, you can use multilingual content.
Besides, it’s advised that you determine whether you will earn profit from an additional web presence or not. If it’s too early to barge into the international arena, Moz recommends you acquire country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the countries with huge potential and also set a custom alert in Google Analytics, where it reports to you when the country is bringing enough traffic for you to get the ball rolling.
