With the globalization of the world due to internet connectivity, your chances of making your business reachable to the international audience are also growing, and there comes the need for the proper execution of Multilingual and Multiregional SEO on your website. However, for doing so, you need complete expertise in Search Engine Optimization for better ranking and performance of your website on a global level.
However, before moving forward with the complete guide to Multilingual and Multiregional SEO, it is important to understand what they stand for and where you will be targeted across the globe.
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Multilingual means dealing with multiple languages. Hence, as the name suggests “Multilingual SEO” is the process of optimizing the website in different languages so that it could be made accessible to audiences of different languages around the world. It is done to maximize the reach of your business among a multilingual audience.
While Multiregional SEO is the art of optimizing the website content in a way that it could perform better in varied geographical locations. These two techniques might sound similar but have their distinct significance in the digital marketing era. Other important digital marketing strategies like pay-per-click, conversion rate, and content strategy are tied up with these two techniques for better implementation of the overall online marketing strategy.
For proper execution of Multilingual and Multiregional SEO, it is important for you to determine the regions that you will be targeting for your websites along with the languages that you will be implementing in your website for those regions. It means that both multilingual and multiregional SEOs are related to each other, but the entire execution depends on the proper planning of these two techniques.
With the prospects of your business expanding among your potential customers, the search and popularity of your products are becoming globally recognizable and because your website is restricted to offering services and products in only one language or a single location, you might be losing a great opportunity of making more sales and revenue through your online business.
Hence, you have to find a way to make your web content reachable across the globe to a wider range of audiences, and there comes the need for Multilingual and Multiregional SEO techniques, which are performed to make your business branding expandable among the audiences throughout the globe. But how do you know whether you are receiving international traffic or not?
For this, you have to visit your Google Analytics account and click on Audience>Geo checking the popular countries that are contributing to your website’s traffic.
When you found out the countries from where you are getting maximum traffic, you can also drill down to know the popular languages.
Now, you can easily formulate your Multilingual SEO strategies and Multiregional SEO strategies for targeting those international audiences for better branding of your business.
Once, you have understood where you are targeting for performing multilingual and multiregional SEO, the next step is to select the URL structure strategy and domain. The Official Webmaster Central blog of Google states that it is not easy to perform geo-targeting on a page-by-page basis and it is necessary to consider the URL structure for segmenting parts of the website for geo-targeting.
Mapping the right location structure will definitely help in making the project much easier for the SEO expert as well.
If you want to expand the opportunities of benefits through Multilingual and Multiregional SEO, it is important for you to plan the information architecture of your website followed by structuring the URLs of your website subsequently.
Here is the option that assists in structuring the URLs for localized content:
This option for URL structuring has the following advantages over other options:
Aligning your business goals with the new SEO strategy is vital for ensuring that you are targeting the right audience by offering them content that they like to read and share. However, here also the next key consideration is to know whether we are able to target the specific regions, languages, or possibly both.
I will explain this to you using a real-life scenario. Let’s say that FashionWorld is a fictional online store, which is selling cosmetics like hot cakes in the US. Now, the online store wants to expand its reach across the international markets as well like France and Italy. In this case, Fashionworld.it has to target both the countries France and Italy and their languages as well because then only it can make its sales in those countries. In this case, they have to implement their website in French and Italian languages to make their web content easily accessible to the audiences in these countries.
The main website of FashionWorld will be fashionworld.com, but the sister websites will be fashionworld.fr and fashionworld.it with the same content written properly in French and Italian languages respectively. It’s the only way that we can implement both Multilingual and Multiregional strategies for ensuring the success of this online store in international markets like France and Italy.
Some points to remember while implementing Multilingual and Multiregional SEO:
Your usual SEO practice should be considered for all new sites you create for targeting different regions and languages, but you have to make some additional On-page tweaks as well to ensure that Google is indexing your web content appropriately and that it understands that the content is targeted for specific regions.
Besides, other important considerations to take while executing multilingual and multiregional SEO strategies are:
IP address along with the hosting server details is also an important technical SEO factor to consider. For example, if fashionworld.com is hosted on an American server, it is necessary for the website to be hosted on French and Italian IP addresses because it might seem to be a minor factor in the ranking of your website but it is always a good idea to start the implementation from the foundation itself.
For notifying Google about your international content, another key factor to take into consideration is the Google Webmaster Tools. When you have created new websites, it becomes necessary to submit your new websites to Google Webmaster tools to keep the track of the performance of your websites in different regions.
Another interesting factor is to consider the way how your target audience will consume your content. Taking this into consideration will help in evaluating your international campaign’s ad, and its success among the users. It will not only help in making your international campaigning efforts successful but will also give you an idea of representing your content in the best possible way to the local users of specific regions.
One of the most outsourced steps, translation is crucial for the proper implementation of multilingual and multiregional SEO strategies because it determines the overall conversion rates of your website in the international marketplace. Remember that all your efforts will go in vain instead of accumulating significant traffic if the visitors have not taken some kind of action. Hence, ensure that the web content is translated taking into consideration the intent of users along with the variations of keyword phrases to help grow your business across the globe.
With the implementation of a Multilingual SEO strategy, the issue of duplicate content arises that may have a negative impact on the organic ranking of your website even if it has two different URLs that are targeted at the same local audience. Hence, to solve this issue, you have two options:
Besides these two options, you can also use rel= “alternate” hreflang= “x”. I will explain this to you by citing an example. Suppose you have a website in the English language as www.abc.com, and you also have another website in the Italian language as www.abc.it. You can use any of the three ways made by Google for indicating that the Italian website is equivalent to your English website.
1. HTTP link element
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”es” href=”http://es.abc.com/” />
2. HTTP Header
If your web page contains non-HTML content like a PDF file, then you can use rel= “canonical” HTTP headers for specifying the canonical URLs for HTML documents.
3. Sitemap
You can also submit language specific version through a sitemap in place of using markup. In the sitemap, each of the languages will be set up using rel= “alternate” hreflang= “x” for recognizing the varied languages and regions.
Multilingual and multiregional SEO is constantly changing and evolving. But the great thing about how things are ever-changing is that if you focus on the new strategies for research, you get surprisingly great ideas to improve your businesses.
Taking a leap into international SEO can be a cumbersome task but if you really want to make your business successful throughout the world, it becomes necessary to learn the importance and ways of implementing Multilingual and Multiregional SEO strategies for your website.
The above article has everything you need to know to get started and stamp out the competition with your multilingual and multiregional SEO strategy. Now, implementing such strategies can be quite challenging even for seasoned SEO professionals.
Hence, if you have finalized your decision for taking your business to the next level of success, you can take the excellent SEO services offered by our expert team of SEO to get your business successful in this competitive international marketplace.
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