When we have a business, having a good website is essential to promote our brand’s online presence and communication. They say that if you are not on the Internet, you do not exist. And that no matter how good a product is, it won’t sell if it doesn’t communicate well.
There are many channels through which we can promote our products: social networks, email marketing, outdoor advertising, SEO. And to do SEO, we need an excellent website for a position. This website will be our cover letter, the first thing our potential client will see from the sofa at home. So we have to have a complete, well-structured, clean web page that provides the user with information clearly and precisely.
Why is SEO so important?
With a good SEO positioning, we make our website visible to search engines (Google is the most used) to increase visits to the web. Each month there are more than 61 billion searches, of which half are converted into conversions. So this shows that good visibility and presence in search engines are excellent opportunities for a website that wants to increase its sales and its number of customers.
Correct steps to get a good SEO positioning
Analyze and define the correct keywords
In this phase, analyze which are the keywords that customers use to find your business website. This information is essential to know the profitability and relevance of those keywords and direct competition. Once you analyze competitors’ websites, start your keyword research based on the industry, your products, and your services.
Performing an ON PAGE analysis
We review the website to verify that all pages are accessible and optimized for search engines with this analysis. The internal structure of the links is examined to get more presence in the searches. The texts of the pages are also tagged with the keywords established in the previous analysis.
- SEO strategy links
- SEO positioning report
- Search terms statistics
- Traffic report
- Suggestions for improvement
What is multilingual SEO? What does it consist of?
When we consider expanding our business, to various countries and regions. We have to take care of website content translation and understand the role of local SEO, and multilingual SEO plays.
One of the first actions is website translation according to the countries’ languages where you want to expand. But this will not help if we do not work on the positioning of the website. This is where multilingual SEO comes into play to achieve an excellent natural positioning in search engines in different countries.
Aspects to consider for multilingual SEO
Different subdomains, subdirectories, or websites
When it comes to expanding our business in different countries and different languages, we have three possibilities to diversify our website:
- Acquire other domains for each region
This option consists of buying different domain names with excellent SEO positioning capacity for each country to which we want to expand. The main problem with this option is the difficulty of its management and the few possibilities to upload positions in the search engine for the main website. On the other hand, it would also negatively affect brand communication, confusing users about the correct domain.
- Creation of subdomains
An easy structure to remember for the user, but the same thing happens as in the previous case when creating different subdomains for each country. This makes it difficult for the SEO visibility of the main web page.
- Creating subdirectories
Since it helps the growth of the website, thus achieving a better SEO positioning. In addition, this option does not have the problem of the previous two, thus reinforcing the brand image internationally.
Choose the appropriate language and region code
When defining subdomains or directories, or when assigning tags, we must consider that each page of our website must be associated with the correct language and region codes. These codes must be standardized worldwide so that search engines can index them correctly.
Otherwise, if we do not consider these rules, we will have severe problems with SEO.
The correct definition of the target audience: geographic or linguistic?
Depending on the business strategy that we have proposed, we must segment geographically or linguistically.
If we consider that we can generate differentiated and quality content for each of our markets, the most appropriate thing is to bet on geographic segmentation.
On the contrary, if we do not have the resources to create that differentiated content, we will have to opt for linguistic segmentation.
Use of the “rel” and “hreflang” tags
Regardless of whether we have chosen a geographical or linguistic segmentation, our main objective is that when the user searches the search engine. Our page appears in their language and the place from which they are connected. To achieve this, we need to correctly implement the “rel” and “hreflang” tags, which are managed through Google Webmaster Tools.
Five correct translation and adaptation of meta tags
Finally, note that it is necessary to translate the texts into the different languages we want to introduce ourselves. Still, it is also appropriate to adapt the texts assigned to the meta tags of each page on multilingual websites to each market.
The main meta tags to optimize could be: Title, meta-description, keywords, headings, positioning text.
Finally, we want to emphasize that Google is not the predominant search engine in all countries (Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia), so we must optimize everything mentioned according to the specifications of these search engines.
Conclusion
A great way to position yourself well in international markets in a multilingual SEO strategy is to produce content on topics that users value in a group of speakers. If you dig into the research on that strategy, you will find that many of your competitors do not consider its details. And therefore, many opportunities are lost.
One of them is to approach the topics with information and visual resources that the speakers of the language in question will recognize more easily. Thus, the most interesting thing about SEO in multiple languages is that it does not require extra investments.
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