A multilingual website is a site that delivers content in multiple languages. For example, if you have an audience in Canada that understands English and French, the website can be in both languages. Google Search tries to find pages that match your search language. Many regional sites are sites that only serve customers from different countries.
Google Search tries to find a reasonable site for nearby search. So, if your website is in two separate languages or many for that matter, Google will crawl the page in the language of the search terms put by the consumer and show them pages in the language of their preference only. This is beautiful, right?
Hence, leveraging localised SEO or local SEO as a strategy for a multi lingual website can work exceptionally for a business. With this article, we will try and understand how a multilingual website uplifts your Local SEO.
- Using specific and dedicated URLs
The use of specific URLs is one of the biggest concerns of many websites being double digits. While not all duplicate content is harmful, content found on multiple URLs can result in penalties such as demotion or delisting. To avoid duplicate content penalties, Google best practices recommend using “confidential URLs” with a content markup language. This indicator allows search engines and users to recognize the language from the URL alone. For example, the original site would be www.example.com, while the French version would be www.example.com/fr/, the German version would be www.example.com/de, and so on. The location of URL language tags depends on the URL structure you choose, especially the use of country code top-level domains (ccTLD) and custom subdomains for your site.
- Use of href language tags
In addition to the language guidelines above, Google uses the hreflang property to specify the language of your site and the region where your site is located. These tags can be included in the title of the original page or sent via the site map. For example, the hreflang tag associated with a French site for Canadian readers looks like this: If your site is for multiple regions, you can add multiple hreflang properties. However, keep in mind that the entire process is just as complicated and time-consuming, especially for beginners.
- Use of one language a page
You may want to translate some web pages that have one language on the page and hide the rest in the original language. Sometimes a website can have multiple languages: the main content is translated, but the navigation text is in the original language. User-generated content (such as forum threads and comments) is available in multiple languages. In any case, the desired language and region of the page can be specified by adding the hreflang tag at the top. However, multiple site languages can improve the user experience. In the first case above, the reader can understand the main content but has difficulty navigating through the rest of the pages. In the latter case, user-generated content in multiple languages can lose the context of the discussion or confuse or frustrate the reader.
- Contextualizing the meta-data
A keyword may not match your translated page in your site’s native language. That means you need to do some keyword research on your new target brands. This can easily be done through Ahrefs or Ubersuggest. All you have to do is use their keyword explorer and type in a translated keyword, select the country and evaluate the results to get a better idea of what your potential search will be like.
- Make sure your site loads quickly
One of the applications you can do for multilingual SEO (and SEO in general) is to make your site faster. Since July 2018, the time taken to download your website has become a key factor for search engines. This means that any small effort you make to make your site load faster can immediately affect your site traffic, especially if some of your pages are fast (more than 3 seconds). You can implement many quick benefits to make significant changes in load time. These include: Installing a plugin that helps to cache pages, configuring your browser cache Connecting a CDN to your site, optimizing your image size (short pixels vs. short). Many of these optimizations are less technical and creative.
The good news is that if you are using WordPress to build your website, you can get a lot of plugins that implement these applications – as long as you don’t want to get a single code snippet. Plugins like WP Rocket will handle many of Google’s PageSpeed Insights detected issues, including the above. If you need help in a bid to understand this better, consult a managed SEO provider too.
Conclusion
Here is hoping that you have understood how multilingual websites uplift your local SEO. If you want to start off with a website that needs to be transaction first, then you can read an article about starting with eCommerce websites that are SEO friendly. In case of any questions with the article, please share them with us in the comments section below.
