With only around a quarter of all internet users being native English-speakers, and studies showing that multilingual surfers put more trust in websites written in their own native language, it’s clear that a multilingual approach to online marketing is essential for anyone wishing to fully tap the true potential of the internet. Multilingual marketing can seem like a daunting process, so here’s seven simple tips to help cross those linguistic boundaries.
Separate your languages
Google’s Webmaster Central blog recommends avoiding side-by-side translations and sticking to the same language for every element of the page, from headers to content to navigation bars. Using different languages on the same page can confuse both web crawlers and human visitors.
Decide how to target your markets
Some languages are spoken across several different countries and you may consider it enough to have a single site in, say, Spanish to cover Spain, the large Spanish-speaking populations of Latin America and isolated territories such as Equatorial Guinea. Similarly, a single French version could cover France, French-speaking Switzerland and Belgium, Quebec and several former French colonies in Africa. Targeting a market by language will usually be the easiest and cheapest option but you should be aware that linguistic usage does vary between territories. – for instance, the French spoken in France is very different to Le Francais Québécois. Targeting your websites by country will also open up certain SEO options – search engines want to return pages that are relevant to local searchers. As with many marketing decisions, it basically comes down to a call between cost and efficacy.
ccTLDs will boost SEO
If you decide to target your markets by country, investing in separate country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) for your localized sites will boost your rankings on Google’s own local search engines as well as local competitors. An example of a country code Top Level Domain would be www.mysite.it for Italy or www.mysite.mx for Mexico. Search engine algorithms take location into account as well as content and ensuring your site is hosted on a server physically located in your target country will boost your rankings still further.
Consider subdomains and subdirectories
If you decide against using separate ccTLDs, you should at the very least set up separate subdomains and subdirectories for your localized content. An example of a subdomain for localized Italian content would be www.it.mysite.com and a subdirectory would be www.mysite.com/it/. Google has a Geographic Targeting tool in Webmaster Tools that allows you to select specific countries or geographic areas for different subdomains and subdirectories.
Build local links
Building links is an important part of any SEO strategy. In multilingual marketing the location of the back links is as important as their quality and relevance. In practical terms, this could mean submitting guest posts to a relevant site in your target market and language. Alexa is a useful resource for sourcing highly ranked international sites.
Don’t directly translate keywords
However you translate your content, you should never rely on a direct ‘dictionary’ translation for your keywords. There may be regional synonyms, colloquialisms, abbreviations or other variations which are more popular, meaning a keyword that works in one market might not be successful in another. By all means run direct translations through search engine keyword tools to see which will still work but a bit of research and local knowledge is essential here to come up with alternatives.
There are search engines other than Google
Google is the single most widely used search engine worldwide but in certain markets local competitors have a greater market share. In the Czech Republic, for example, Seznam is the market leader while Yahoo! Trumps Google in Japan. The basics of SEO remain the same but each engine has its own little quirks and algorithms and you should make use of the keyword and other research tools for every significant search engine within your target market.
About the author
Christian Arno is the founder and Managing Director of global translation agency and localisation specialists Lingo24. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 120 employees spanning four continents and clients in over sixty countries.
Contact Lingo24 with a translation request mentioning www.marketingwiseguy.com before October 30, 2010 and receive a 10% discount on your first order.
Hi Christian, I really enjoyed your article on multilingual online marketing as this is something I am working on at the moment. I am about to start developing an Arabic site and this will be followed up with a Spanish site for Latin America and then an SEM campaign to promote them. Thank you for the tips!
Personally I use a translator tool on my site but I guess I could see how having different sites could be better.
You should also make sure you are pinging international ping services, rather than the conventional ping services which distribute to mostly English only sites.
Great tips, I’ve been looking to expand into an international market, but finding strategies for online international marketing has been a challenge.