Multilingual Web Content Strategies

Looking to increase site traffic from your audiences abroad? Then you should consider some international SEO best practices to maximize your site’s presence in search engines within different countries. Here are five tips to account for when embarking on a multilingual content strategy:

1. Translate your content professionally. Be sure you're appropriately translating content to the language standards of each country. Avoid auto translation tools because they will not translate everything so that it’s fully coherent and reads professionally. Search engines can actually detect auto-translated content and will therefore rank it lower or not at all.
2. Perform keyword research by geographic location. The Google keyword tool lets you analyze search volume by country and region. Leverage your existing keyphrase strategy and go from there.
3. Secure country-specific, top-level domains (TLD). Search engines are more likely to return results of domains that correspond to the country they are in. For example, Google.fr search results heavily contain .fr TLDs.
4. Host site within country. Consider hosting the site from an IP address within that country. Search engines look at where the site is hosted, which can play a role in the rankings.
5. Track and optimize. Carefully track your international content within your web analytics platform. Understand how content is performing in search engines and how your content is being consumed with users once they’re on the site, then optimize performance.

For further insight, check out our VerndaleTV segment on international SEO and consult with your search engine optimization team.