If you own a global business you may want to know that people prefer sites that are optimized in their native language. So if you’re not targeting the right keywords in each country and optimizing for local search engines, your Multilingual SEO Agency is potentially missing a large part of your target audience.

6 Multilingual SEO Agency Best Practices

When it comes to language, the smallest nuances can have an impact. The same is true for multilingual SEO. Follow these tips by Venga Global to keep your website rankings higher in all of your target countries:

1. Optimize for UTF-8 characters.

Make sure your website can accommodate foreign characters by using UTF-8 encoding. When characters become corrupted because of encoding issues or improper character support, it can prevent your site from being properly crawled. Remember that good multilingual SEO agencies rely on more than just the content on the page. Your image alt tags, titles, and keywords must also be able to match the terms in target language. If a word becomes illegible because it has corrupted characters, all of your hard translation work is wasted.

2. Conduct keyword research.

In many cases, a straight translation of your keywords will not work. The translated words might have a different meaning or simply might not be the search terms users are most likely to use in their native language. For example, consumers in the U.K. search for terms like “weekend holiday” whereas the same search in American English would be “weekend vacation” or “weekend getaway.” It is also worthwhile for multilingual SEO agencies to make the effort to provide properly translated keywords for site resources such as images, videos, and reference documents.

3. Understand search engines.

Although Google is popular in the United States, it is not the only search engine used globally. Take the time to learn what the most popular search engine is in each target country and learn what’s known about how their search algorithms work. For example, Bing is more popular in Canada, while Russia uses Yandex, Korea uses Naver, and China uses Baidu. Limiting your multilingual SEO strategy to Google alone will limit your exposure to a large part of your potential, international customer base.

4. Check your strategy.

Search engines are constantly changing the way they work as their priorities evolve. Take the time to periodically evaluate your multilingual SEO agency strategy to ensure that your current methods are in sync with the search engines. This requires monitoring industry news and staying up-to-date with the latest SEO trends.

5. Pay attention to URL structure.

ccTLDs such as .jp or .ie tell search engines which country a website is designed for. If you are unable to purchase the desired target country ccTLD and have a more generic domain such as .com or .net you can use subdirectories like EN-GB with the language and country information. The more locale appropriate information a multilingual SEO agency can provide to search engines, the better able you are to serve up your site to the right people in that country.

6. Href lang.

Including hreflang information in the code of your website is another way to tell search engines which language a site uses, which helps increase search ranking for those target languages.

Conclusion.

It is important to remember that multilingual SEO is not just about bringing traffic to your website, it’s about bringing the right traffic. If you optimize with keywords that are not what people search for or simply have the wrong meaning because you don’t understand the language nuances, you might get a lot of visitors to your site, but they won’t be likely to convert to customers if they landed there because they were looking for something else.

Learn more about the most effective SEO techniques reading the article: International SEO Consultant Best Practices.

Do you want to rank high for different languages? Contact Us, our Multilingual SEO Agency will plan the best strategy for you.

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