WordPress SEO and Multilingual SEO always go together and contribute to reach those audiences who may or may not have the ability to speak your language.
There are a lot of people who check WordPress blogs, but they may live in different countries. So, if you wish to drive traffic to your WordPress website or blog, you can never miss these important demographics.
As evident from the recent study by Harvard Business Review, MNCs are reliant on thorough local customer bases to ensure an effective international expansion. Local customers who consider visiting your website will do mouth-marketing.
But, in case your website is not optimized for your target market, then new customers would not be attracted to your products or services.
In the below-mentioned section, you will get to know about the best ways in which you would be able to incorporate multilingual SEO with ease. This guide will also let you know about the importance of content localization for driving traffic to your WordPress website.
About Multilingual SEO
Multilingual SEO is nothing but the specific need to market as well as optimize your content for consumers who are involved in speaking multiple languages.
For example, if you are looking forward to targeting the French language, then you need to optimize your content for all the countries where French is considered to be the official language along with France.
So, in this case, your main goal is to optimize content that is available for many of the languages. This means that an English website should also possess its French variant. Although this is regarded as a useful strategy, it is somewhat difficult to achieve this.
Here are given some of the best multilingual SEO strategies which you should use for your WordPress website:
- This particular SEO strategy first requires setting up the website for multilingual use. So, this includes technical processes like:
- Landing Page: You can select which landing page visitors will first see. So, you would be able to target both language and region.
- hreflang: You can make use of hreflang which is the technical code for all multilingual websites. So, you can focus on adding hreflang tags in WordPress.
By using this, Google will know which page to specifically show for a particular language or region.
This tag is a combination of the region as well as language which helps Google to rank these pages. If you fail to do this, Google will assume it to be duplicate content.
- Multilingual Site Maps: To crawl your website, Google requires a sitemap specifically to avoid any confusion. You can make use of a WordPress plugin to achieve this.
- Domain Strategy: You can focus on selecting your domain like yourwebsite.eu for a European site, yourwebsite.ca for a French site, and so on.
- Multiregional SEO is an important part of a multilingual SEO strategy. This is the practice of creating optimized website content which is tailored to multiple geographical regions.
- Multilingual SEO will fail without SEO strategies which include researching keywords, including translated keywords, adding metadata, etc.
- Although it is not possible to duplicate content, it is possible to translate it. The translation is one of the major multilingual SEO strategies that you should focus on following.
Content localization should be done in such a way so that it fits target audiences. This means that you have to do the language work, SEO work, and technical work. The language should be suitable enough for cultural differences in different regions. - Content is still the king and so, it should also be localized. This is considered to be the most integral part of the multilingual SEO strategy. Let’s have a detailed discussion regarding this in the below-mentioned section:
More About Content Localization
This is considered to be the process of ensuring that the native speakers of the target language are just as accommodated as specifically the source language.
For example, in case you are translating from English to Spanish, all that you need is to make sure that your audiences in English, Spain, and Argentina are equally accommodated. Without this, you may find it much difficult to enter a completely new market.
Not only that, but while expanding your business, you should also get an idea about the specific needs of your consumer. So, this is something that has a lot to do with the culturally diverse needs of your consumer base.
You can achieve this particular thing by optimizing the content on the homepage which is applicable in some of the cases.
Whereas, in some other cases, it means that your content may stay the same for all your multilingual sites, but your news or blog posts sections should remain specific to that audience.
Differences Existing Between Globalization, Internalization, And Localization
Content localization strategy again consists of three major parts known to be globalization, internalization as well as localization. So, you should focus on understanding the differences between them as discussed in this section:
- Globalization: This is a broad term for all processes like internalization, localization, multiregional SEO, and multilingual SEO.
The process involves connecting with audiences all over the world through targeting specific regions or being part of a broader international conversation. - Localization: This process involves adapting content to a specific audience or a specific locale. It is about looking at the product, website, or service in the view of that specific audience.
- Internalization: This is the opposite of localization i.e. it is the process of making a particular product appealing to a large group of people. So, internalizing your product will make it a mass appeal.
But the best part is that all of these work together. So, if you focus on globalizing your WordPress website, then you can choose to internalize, localize, to do multiregional or multilingual, or all of those.
Final Verdict
Therefore, it is evident that a multilingual SEO approach is not that complex, but your main focus should be on your target audience. If you are finding it difficult, then all that you need is to take the help of a professional WordPress service provider.