How can translating your website boost your SEO

Do you work for a company that’s looking to or has already tried to expand into one or more international markets? Have you noticed that you’re not getting the website traffic you were hoping for, or that your international visitors bounce without interacting with your site?

Well it’s not a surprise that the quicker the technology which allows companies to reach international audiences improves, the more the competition grows. This makes it even harder for companies to stand out and appear in front of the eyes of their potential international clients. However, by improving your SEO the probability of your site appearing higher in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) will increase, and the cost of targeting valuable local keywords as part of your cross-border PPC campaign will decrease. But you might already know that. The question is how can translating your website help you not only improve your SEO but also result in more traffic and hopefully some valuable leads ready to convert into sales?

Translated versions of your site get rewarded by search engines 

Offering foreign-language versions of your website receives a higher overall SEO ranking because each translated version of your site with a unique URL is read by search engines as part of the same site. The amount of traffic each version receives is added up and considered as part of the same site, thus improving the SEO ranking for the whole website.

What you have to do

• Choose your URL format wisely. You want potential international clients to be able to find their native-language version of your site easily. Depending on your history and target markets you can either assign a unique domain to your translated versions (i.e.yourbusiness.de), a subdomain (i.e. de.yourbusiness.com) or a subfolder (i.e. yourbusiness.com/de). That way search engines will not penalise you for duplicate content, and will instead improve your overall SEO ranking.

Increasing your visitors and engagement will improve you SEO ranking

Web users are more likely to convert into sales if the information is in their native language, but why is that? The reason is that when internet users search the web for a product or a service they usually use their native language. That means the keywords you have used to optimise the English version of your site won’t be used in searches by your international audience and so won’t trigger page impressions of your site.

For example, let’s say your company manufactures orthopaedic insoles and you’re looking to partner with Italian shoe design houses. After you complete your keyword research, you identify that “orthopaedic insole manufacturer” has lots of hits and low competition and therefore decide to optimise your website content by incorporating that keyphrase in your main copy, meta description and meta tags. However, when an Italian shoe design company searches for “produttore di plantare ortopedico” Google doesn’t recognise that you’re offering what they’re looking for because you haven’t told them that this is the same thing. As a result, your competitors who have translated their website and SEO will appear in front of your target audience and win the opportunity instead.

Tactics to follow

• Partner with a professional translation company whose native translators will identify which are the most valuable local keywords used by your international audience
• Translate your SEO and website based on that keyword research. By optimising your translated content, tags and meta descriptions with the keywords your international audience uses, you’ll appear in more searches and get more traffic and engagement, thus improving your overall SEO ranking
• Translate your blogs to increase your local inbound links. Receiving inbound links from the press, influencers and content creators who live in your target location will be easier when your blogs are translated into their native language. It is highly unlikely that these professionals will link to a piece if part of their readership is not able to get any value from it. The more local links you receive, the better your local SEO

Translating your website

Whether this is the first time you have considered translating your website or you have done it before but are looking to add more content to one of the translated versions of your site, we have designed our processes to help you reach your desirable outcome.

Our process

1. Receiving your enquiry

We receive your project details, process the source files
using our specialist translation software where possible and
send you a quote with a cost breakdown and estimated turnaround time.

2. Going ahead with your order

When the quote is accepted, we place the project with
proofessional translators who specialise in the subject
of the texts involved and are native speakers of the required
target languages. We make sure the linguists have any relevant
reference material such as previous translations and glossaries
to ensure consistency with the existing material.

3. Client-translator communication

The translator will invest time in getting familiar with any
client-specific communication guidelines to make sure the translation
adheres to the company’s tone of voice. If our linguists have any
questions about the project along the way, we clarify these with you
to ensure the texts and the wider context of the project are understood
by those working on it.

4. Updating your terminology resources and delivering your project

When the project is finalised, we make sure any glossaries or
translation memories are updated with new terminology from the project
to ensure consistency and cost savings in similar texts in future
and deliver the completed files to you. It’s that simple!

If you have a project that requires website translation, please refer to our website translation service page or contact one of our project managers to see how we can help