Having a well-optimised SEO website is the first step towards success.
If your website ranks high for the most popular keywords within the client base in your home country, your revenue generation will be on a constant upward trajectory.
And now because you have conquered the local market, it would be the best time to expand your business in the international market.
However, there lies a problem. The kind of online domination that has worked for you so well back home doesn’t seem to work in these new markets.
Now you are panicking, not knowing what to do. But don’t worry; this article will help you understand what’s wrong with your online marketing strategies and how to navigate around the problem.
So, what is happening? Well, your global success is stagnating because you probably have not yet found the right combination of multilingual SEO and global localisation.
The international audience wants the content in your website translated to the language they understand best, and then everything is spiced up by a strong multilingual SEO strategy.
Multilingual SEO is a content optimising strategy where you align your website and its content to the language and structure that search engines can quickly identify with. At the same time helping engines to pick which country or region every language in your website is targeting.
To leverage the full potential of multilingual SEO, your localisation strategy must be flawless. You must anchor your plans for global success on these two factors.
And because you only get one chance to impress your audience, then you cannot afford to get anything wrong, be it on multilingual SEO or global localisation.
Bottom line: You only get a fair shot at global success if your web content is cultivating, readable, understandable, easily accessible, optimally targeted, and easily searchable in as many countries, languages, and slangs as possible.
The two are intertwined
“SEO experts will tell you that it is difficult to tell multilingual SEO and localisation apart. These two are so close that one cannot function without the other. When you think of localising visual content to a certain language, then you are already overlapping to multilingual SEO. When you think of localising code for maintenance, you definitely will have to engage local linguistic experts, which is multilingual SEO.” say SEO experts of Tactica. In a nutshell, multilingual SEO cannot stand on its own without localisation and vice versa.
Direct translations aren’t enough
If your idea of localisation is using a translation tool to translate your content into a foreign language, then you are leaving a lot to fall through the cracks.
One language can have more than five terminologies referring to the same thing, or one word having more than five possible translations. The only way you will take care of that is by using multilingual SEO tactics.
Identifying the right search engines for your audience
This goes without saying: Google is the dominant search engine in most developed global economies. But the word we all look for in business is “all” and not “most”. What you need is a team of lingual experts to help you optimise your keywords for not only Google but also other relevant engines.
Think of a case where you are targeting Chinese consumers with your product. The chances are that you won’t get any business going in the country because only 1 per cent of the Chinese population uses Google to search for products online.
You will have to optimise your keywords for Baidu, the dominating engine in the region with over 70 per cent of all internet users. Localisation alone will not get this done. You will need the help of multilingual SEO to succeed.
Source: e27
