How to Translate Your Website and Maximize Your SEO Position

Why should you translate your website and maximize your SEO?

The purpose of SEO is to get your website to appear at the top of a search engine results page on multiple search engines.

Your site’s SEO position is determined by several factors, including the search terms used to find products or services, meta-descriptions, website reputation and links. These and other elements determine where – or whether – your website appears in organic searches.

All those pages that appear at the top of web searches on Google or Yahoo have been optimized to get to the top of those searches. However, the optimization strategy that works in one language may not work in another.

Spanish speakers are not going to use the same terms as English speakers to find the products or services they need. What’s more, search engines that are widely used in other countries may not use the same algorithms as Google or Yahoo use. This means that each language must have its own SEO positioning strategy, and this requires more than a standard translation.

Best options for translating your website

Your newly translated website needs to be optimized for the search engines speakers of that language use to find products and services. A specialized translation is the best approach.

Here are some of the options available.

Specialized translation with a review by SEO experts

Translation of website content, particularly performed by an expert in the field with specific knowledge of the target markets and industry terminology, is an acceptable option for most website translation projects. When it comes to SEO positioning, though, it can fall short.

SEO requires more than just translating text. It requires understanding how search engines rank websites and how the target language’s speakers search on the web. A translator can produce clear text and make sure your message reaches end users correctly, but a review from an SEO expert will ensure your target audience can find it.

Once the translator has finished the content, the SEO expert will examine the copy to check for keywords, content optimization and other on-page elements, while also reviewing the elements not seem by web users including tags and page speed. The combination of quality translation and web localization will make your website more user-friendly and searchable.

Machine translation with expert review

Due to increasingly sophisticated machine translation platforms and connectors that enable automatic translation in content platforms, this is becoming one of the most popular options for website translation. They make translation faster, but not necessarily more precise.

Automatic translation technology speeds up the process, but the result of these unreviewed machine translations often include contextual errors, as the translated words may have a different meaning than the original text. This makes the text less appealing and less relevant in web searches, and your SEO ranking will take a hit.However, if the result of the machine translation goes through a process of review and SEO optimization by specialists before being published, the result will be a correctly translated and high-ranking website.

SEO consultation before translation

The two options mentioned above involve SEO review after translation. Another option is bringing in an SEO expert before the translation process even begins.

Whether you want to translate your website into Spanish, German, French, Japanese, or all of the above, your SEO strategy will be different from the one you apply to your original language. As the number of translations increases, so will the number of SEO strategies. An SEO expert will streamline the process even before you start translating.

An SEO expert will be able to provide important insights into the translation of your website, including:
• Which keywords generate the best search engine results in the target language
• How often your keywords should appear on a page
• The most relevant page titles and meta-descriptions for your target audience
• Minimum text length

Using these insights, your translators will have all the insights they need to create truly optimized pages that attract multilingual visitors.

The higher your site ranks, the greater your company’s visibility traffic and sales. When translating your website for global markets, don’t just translate it – optimize it.

Click here to learn more about Ubiqus web localization and SEO solutions, or contact us if you’re ready to localize your website.