SEO translation and why your marketing localization needs it

Many companies underestimate the need for SEO translation and miss out on a whole lot of opportunities. In this post, we share some basic but helpful SEO tips from David García Ruiz, an IT/EN>ES translator specializing in marketing and SEO translation. Make sure to share it with your customers!

You have decided to translate your website into a new language, aiming to reach new customers. However, some time has gone by, and you are not getting any queries from the translated version of the website. Google processes over 3.5 billion searches per day worldwide. Perhaps, there is someone behind a screen looking for your products or services in the new market you are trying to reach, but your website is invisible in that target market. To keep it simple, search engine optimisation (SEO) is a combination of techniques that help your website rank high in search results of search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Even if SEO techniques have been applied to your website’s home country version, you will still need to apply those strategies to the translated version of your website. This is why SEO translation is a must if you want to be visible! I am sure you know that… content is king You will hear that phrase repeatedly as the key element of SEO success.

Hence, when it comes to international SEO, the person writing the content in the new language (the translator!) is the one who can make your content SEO friendly. Isn’t it then enough to translate the content that was already optimised in the source language? No: Due to different consumer habits, values and traditions, people may perform searches using different words and sentences that are unique for each country. An example? Imagine you are selling an afternoon tea plus spa experience in London for weekend travellers from Spain. Spaniards will not search for “afternoon tea” in Spanish, just because they do not know what that is! The keywords they may write on Google when searching for similar services may be champagne plus spa London or romantic spa London, but not afternoon tea. Therefore, keyword research is vital to understand the specific words and phrases that are used in each different country. The next step is to effectively incorporate those keywords; I advise including them on:

1. The Description Meta Tag,

2. The heading (H1 tag) and subheadings (H2, H3 tags) of your page, and

3. The first paragraph of your page.

[If you are using Wordpress for your blog, Yoast SEO plugin can be of great help to track this and other criteria — Vova] Lastly, remember that it is important to make sure that copy is still appealing to humans: they are the ones purchasing products and services! Do you have your own tips for SEO translation? Make sure to leave a comment!