SEO approach to Multilingual websites

Providing your website to visitor in their local language can be greatly beneficial to your company. Foreign language visitors will be able to connect far better with your company and product/s that you offer if they experience it in their native tongue. This connection will increase the chances of your visitors taking action that you intent for them to take while visiting your website.

So should we all go out and translate our websites to target visitors that speak language other than the language our website is offered in? Well if you have the local knowledge this could open up a market that you have largely been missing out on in the past. Is it as easy as translating your website into a foreign language?

The short answer is no and here is why.

When you start targeting different people you also target different cultures. What does this mean for you SEO campaigns? Well people differ quite considerably and this means that so should your SEO campaigns. People in different parts of the world could have different behavioral patterns then what you might be used to, which means your current campaign might not be affective in targeting them.

For instance the Spanish have a custom to have a “siesta” in the afternoon after they have ate lunch. What does this mean if I want to target the Spanish? Well everything, this difference in their behavior cause differences in the way the Spanish use search engines.

Not just this but targeting languages can be trickier than simply translating it into one as this languages could also differs from the Country to Country. For instance Dutch spoken in the Netherlands differs from the one in Belgium, as does French spoken in France and French in some African countries.

You will need to translate your website into the dialect that suites the countries you will be targeting. But simply translating directly from English might not cut it either as products might be referred to in a completely differently manner. This will have an impact on your content copy writing as well as your keyword targeting. These can not simply be translate and used as they might not target the way people search for you product and/or services. You will need to go through a new keyword discovery process to find keywords that are specific to the language and dialect.

Possible problems with having translate versions of your website might be issue such as duplicate content cause by this. According to Google this should not be a problem as content create in different languages are not considered by Google as duplicate content. Have a look here for more info on this topic – http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-start-multilingual-site.html

So how should you structure your website to incorporate these new languages? Well the general practice that seems to be followed is to have your visitors land on a splash page where they get to choose the language they prefer. Now in my opinion this could potentially create barriers for search engine spiders. The approach that I use consists of two different techniques.

For website targeting multiple locations where English is not the main business language, I would follow these steps. Firstly track the country your visitors are entering the website from and then reroute them to the page that containing the official and most used language of that country. Further more provide the user with a fixed location on the website where they can choose a different language.

For website simply wanting to connect to customers speaking language different from English in a country where this is the main business language. I would have them land on the English version by default but as above allow them to change the language to their native tongue.

In conclusion targeting multilingual users will need a vast amount of planning and resources to implement a solution that will reach the goals set out for the campaign before hand.