Multilingual Online Marketing and SEO

Multilingual Online Marketing & SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective marketing tools available to businesses in the 21st century. From PPC and AdWords, to on-page optimisation and link-building, the case for SEO is really quite an easy one: if you rank highly on Google for certain key terms, your business is far more likely to succeed than if you don’t.

This is a given. But with international markets, the waters are even muddier. A whole host of cultural and linguistic intricacies must be considered when setting up a foreign language website and to ignore this, is to embark on a rather counterproductive online marketing campaign. It’s important that you speak to your target audience in a language that they not only understand, but in a natural way that resonates with them. There’s little point in having a professionally designed website, if the content lets it down.

So how does a business broaden its online presence in foreign lands? Well, before the SEO process begins, you’ll obviously need to have a foreign language website in the target market.

But before you do this, you must identify which is the best market to target, and this will vary greatly from business to business. You will have to do your research and see where there is a gap for you to exploit. If there are other similar businesses operating already in a specific country, then that’s a good sign as it demonstrates a demand for the product or service. However, be wary of too many companies, as it can be difficult to gain a foothold in an industry that is already saturated.

The next stage is to buy a locally hosted domain name in the target country. It may just be your company name with a local domain extension, for example .es in Spain or .fr in France, or if your company name is a direct reflection of the services you offer (e.g. ‘Web Design Services’), then you would be best translating your company name into the target language and buying that domain name instead. Just as important is your choice of web host as the server they use should be located in the target country – Google considers the IP address of the server in its ranking algorithms.

This lays the foundation for you to translate your website into the desired language. From a content standpoint, you must use a translation company that uses professionally qualified ‘in-country’ translators that translate INTO their native tongue.

Some businesses may be tempted by the many free website translation tools available online – whilst these can be useful if you need to understand the gist of a website in another language, you really don’t want to use such a tool for your own website, as they provide translations that are far from perfect.

It also pays to be wary of the linguistic nuances between dialects. For example, the French spoken in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada are substantially the same, but there are some key differences. There is no room for complacency with your foreign language website, e.g. courriel is ‘email’ in Canadian French but simply ‘email’ in France. And dejeuner is ‘lunch’ in France, but ‘breakfast’ in Belgium and Switzerland.

Localisation and SEO go hand-in-hand. You want professionally written, localised content – this means you musn’t translate your keywords from English. The correct dictionary translation of a keyword or phrase may NOT be what people use to search for the desired product or service locally, they may use colloquialisms or a different word that means the same thing. So in the same way as you identify your industry’s highest ranking keywords for the English market, such as via Google’s free keyword finder, you have to research the keywords for each target country, to ensure your foreign language website is properly optimized.

Once you have your keywords identified for each country, you can then incorporate these into a professionally translated website.

This is just the very basics of launching a foreign language website. The importance of localizing the website for the target market can’t be over-emphasized and there is a myriad of cultural and linguistic complexities that must be addressed in addition to the above – but that would make for an essay in itself!

About the author
Christian Arno is founder and Managing Director of Lingo24, a global translation services provider that specializes in website localization. With operations across four continents and clients in over sixty countries, Lingo24 are on course for a turnover of £3.7m in 2009.

You can comment on this article at Temi’s blog or you can discuss it at UK Webmaster SEO forum