Multilingual SEO Guide: Optimizing Website For Global Audience

Having a professional SEO website is crucial to achieving business success, there’s no doubt about that. However, once you decide to go multinational, that’s a whole new territory. Even if the web contents are localized and translated for the intended audience, this still won’t be enough. To make your website and content accessible to all, you will have to implement multilingual SEO to achieve the best results.

When we visit foreign websites, we often see a translation prompt by Google to change the language of preference. That’s the result of multilingual SEO best practices. If you are wondering what this is, it’s simply enhancing your website accessibility to customers by eliminating language barriers. The process involves localizing your website content into multiple languages by preference. As a result, your target audience extends beyond your geographical region.

Importance Of Multilingual Search Engine Optimization

Multilingual SEO is important for several reasons. The first one and the most obvious is making your website content accessible to all customers irrespective of the language they speak. As most businesses want to expand their digital presence globally, ensuring effective communication is of utmost importance. This is exactly where multi-language site SEO helps. Some of the key factors include:

Wider audience worldwide: As your website content can be communicated to a wider target audience through global multilingual SEO, this helps gain loyal customers from all over the world.

Higher website traffic & SEO rankings: As your global audiences start engaging with your multilingual website, this results in a higher organic traffic generation to your website. Also, most search engines consider the translated versions of your website as one and drive the traffic to your main site.

Improved user experience: Since the language barrier problem is eliminated, your global audience can view your website in their preferred language and comprehend the contents with ease. This, in turn, results in a much better and seamless user experience.

Multilingual SEO vs Regular SEO

Now that you have been hearing the term multilingual SEO a lot, it’s quite natural to assume whether there is any difference between this and regular SEO practices, and yes, there is. The first thing that comes to our minds upon hearing SEO is keywords. Regular SEO practice involves using these keywords to create web content and rank them on search engines, which usually focus on one language.

However, when it comes to multilingual search engine optimization, it’s all about prioritizing language and optimizing your web content across different search engines. It adapts your web content experience to various languages. Despite their differences, both global SEO services drive traffic to your website and are crucial to achieving long-term success. 

Multilingual SEO Best Practices

Learning what is a multilingual SEO strategy is one step and learning the various strategies involving this practice is another. Without much ado, let’s dive in and understand some of the tips for an effective global multilingual SEO strategy.

Pick the Right URL Structure

When it comes to structuring URLs for multi-language site SEO, four different types of processes are involved: 

• Subfolders – Also known as subdirectories, these add a specific country or language code right after the domain name in the URL For eg, in abc.com/en/, here “en” is the subfolder and it denotes the page is in English whereas in abc.com/es/ “es” is the subfolder and denotes the page contents are in Spanish. Some of its primary features include a user-friendly URL and consolidated domain authority, which means all language versions contribute to the same domain authority of the website.

• Subdomains – Subdomains are often a specific language or country code that is placed as a prefix to the main website domain. For eg, for the website en.abc.com, “en” means that the page is in English. Subdomains offer better geo-targeting features and allow search engines to treat individual subdomains as separate entities. Despite having similar names, when it comes to subdomain vs subdirectory, the former is a separate website within a main domain whereas the latter is a folder within the main website.

• Separate domains – In this approach, specific domains representing each country or language version are added as a suffix to the main website domain. For eg, the domain abc.ar denotes that the website is targeted to Argentina, and abc.de means the website is German.

• URL parameters – URL parameters are often the country or language information that is added as respective query strings to the URL. For eg, abc.com/?lang=en. They are often easy to implement without the need to create separate pages or make significant changes to the overall website structure.

Conduct Keyword Research

Before you translate your web content, it is important to perform a keyword research process. This is because global audiences have different interests and intent when searching for information. Doing keyword research helps determine the appropriate keywords that are frequently used in each language version of your website. Just like how keywords are important in your original language, they are also important in the translated versions too, therefore, you should pay attention when translating the terms.

Create localized content for each language

Another important part of global multilingual SEO is creating content that resonates with the intended audience. As the global market is diverse, what works in your main language may not work with multiple languages. When creating content, it must adhere to the local customer preferences, values, and customs such that it increases the chances of being relatable to them. You should always try to avoid directly translating the contents word by word, as it can result in awkward or improper communication.

Pay Attention To URL Slugs

It’s important to focus on your URL slugs while translating the website content. These are the URL text shown after the domain name. URL slugs are helpful for search engines and users alike as it makes clear that there are two different language versions of your website. Examples include abc.com/payments & abc.com/zahlungen. Here the slug terms are “payments” (English) & “zahlungen” (German)

Incorporate hreflang tags

If your multi language site SEO caters to different regions, how do search engines know which one is intended for whom? By implementing hreflangs. These HTML snippet codes effectively tell search engines that users who submit queries in language “a” will want these results and not related pages in language “b.”. Hreflang tags make sure that search engines will only display the appropriate version of content to users, thereby catering to the subtle differences in language usage and preferences.

Ensure Metadata Translation

When it comes to multi-language site SEO, there are often components such as metadata that are exclusive to search engines. This metadata consists of essential information that includes title, description, image alt text, etc. When translating web content, these elements must also be translated, why? If they aren’t translated, driving traffic from your other language pages to your main language page won’t be possible.

Do Internal Linking

Internal linking is a crucial part of SEO. The process involves hyperlinking to other web pages on the same website. This helps improve website navigation, page authority, etc. When implementing multilingual search engine optimization on your website, it’s important to ensure that the internal links lead to the appropriate language version of the intended page. This signals search engines how the different language webpages on your site are related.

Optimize for International Search Engines

Even though Google is the most dominant search engine worldwide, having over 89.34% as of October 2024, it is wise to optimize your website for other search engines if you are implementing global multilingual SEO. This is because certain search engines are more popular in some countries such as Yandex in Russia, Baidu in China, etc. Apart from that, their algorithms and ranking factors might be different, therefore, making optimizations to your website improves reach and engagement.

Winding up

If your ultimate business aim is to achieve a global online presence, multilingual SEO is what you should do. However, doing one isn’t easy as it requires proper planning, execution, addressing technical challenges and the use of the right strategies. Some of them include content localization, keyword research, metadata translation, and more. 

Following these factors will help you create a well-executed multilingual SEO strategy that gets the attention of the global audience and drives organic traffic from all geographical regions. If you wish to learn more about multilingual search engine optimization, connect with us so that we can help you with that aspect.