What most SEO agencies miss about international SEO
International SEO (iSEO) has become somewhat of an “elephant in the room” in marketing circles.
Think about how hard it is to maintain your current organic rankings.
English SEO is already extremely hard for many English-language websites. If you think that just because you paid an army of SEO experts and copywriters to get an optimized English site and then expect Google Translate should be able to handle any other language, you’d be sorely mistaken.
Breaking down international SEO
Google has the same high standards for evaluating content on all search engines, English or otherwise. Other local search engines like Baidu or Yandex follow pretty much the same best practices as well. That’s because, after all, all search engines have the same purpose–that is to provide the best answers in search results and help end-users.
What does this mean for brands that want to go global? Put simply, you need website localization to gain visibility in local markets. It means adapting your website for every new country and region to make it “look native.”
No matter what language your target audience speaks, when you publish online, you should follow the same old SEO best practices:
- Publish high-quality content.
- Implement technical SEO techniques that allow your website to be crawled.
- Do on-page SEO, which includes keyword research and optimization, descriptive URLs, meta descriptions, titles, good user experience, calls to actions, and so on.
- Do off-site SEO to build and consolidate your authority with backlinks.
How many of the above can you achieve by simply working with Google Translate and a freelance developer? Even if your website covers the technical part of SEO impeccably, you can’t grow a business with translated content only.
That’s because international SEO includes more than a couple of technical adjustments. For example, Hreflang tags tell Google what language every page of your website uses, but they don’t automatically optimize your content. How could they? They’re only pieces of code.
The ingredients for a successful iSEO strategy
Most SEO agencies start with the theory that once you’ve optimized your content, the translated versions will also be optimized. Unfortunately, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
The word-to-word translation of a website can’t capture attention, bring traffic, get leads, and generate conversions. That’s because people who speak different languages also have different online search habits.
Successful SEO (the kind that brings relevant traffic and gets engagement) requires four important elements: local marketing knowledge, language skills, cultural insights, and tailored keyword research.
- Local marketing knowledge
Local market knowledge means you are able to familiarize yourself with potential local buyers, competitors, laws and regulations, and any other detail that can influence your local presence.
As a business owner or marketer, you know how important market research is. You can’t just assume there’s no real competition for keywords in the country where you’re planning to launch your product. Just as you can’t expect locals to have an interest in whatever you publish.
The more you know about a local target market, the easier it becomes to adapt your content and marketing campaigns to meet the expectations of the local audience.
Once you know what your local target market is looking for, you need language skills to make sure you speak according to their search habits. Just like you can spot a non-native speaker a mile away, so can pretty much every other culture, regardless of their mother tongue.
Web content that performs well on search engines is usually the result of a long creative process. Your English copy has a strong brand voice, is catchy and authentic, maybe also includes humor and idioms. Google Translate (or any other software) alone can’t transmit all the complexity of a language. You need professional translators to deliver good copy in every different language.
Whether you decide to work with freelancers or hire an iSEO agency, you must make sure that your translators understand the purpose of your content. Also, you should give them all the details about your brand and the target audience, so that they adapt the translated texts.
Google teaches us that powerful marketing starts with a deeper understanding of people. Your audiences in Brazil, Germany, or Japan rarely care about the same things.
Not only do international audiences answer to different titles and types of content, but they also engage differently with brands online. A six-nation study from 2008 revealed that a brand can be perceived differently in different cultures despite identical brand positioning. So, if a company wishes to achieve the same brand perception worldwide, it needs to implement different strategies in every country or region.
- Tailored multi lingual keyword research
The approach of most SEO agencies is to translate keywords just like they do with the rest of the content of a website. What they seem to be missing is that this type of translation doesn’t consider the actual terms used by local audiences to find information online.
This area is where the difference between international and classic SEO agencies is most visible. iSEO agencies are aware of all the cultural differences that determine different behaviors online.
The translated version of a high-intent keyword in English can be irrelevant for a foreign audience and vice versa. A keyword you’ve chosen to ignore in English, once translated, could be an excellent source of relevant traffic internationally. Based on this knowledge, local experts perform keyword research and pick the right keywords based on their search volume for every new country or region.
Multilingual keyword research enables you to use the right keywords for each stage of your international buyers’ journey.
Optimizing the content for each language
As you already know, the quality of your content stays at the heart of any SEO strategy, local or international. When the content has the right flow, and all keywords get integrated naturally, you have better chances to delight your audience and get the engagement you need.
Professional translators and linguists have the language skills necessary to reach the proper balance between the technical part of iSEO and the socio-cultural aspect. Moreover, they manage to deliver tailor-made content in any language without sacrificing your brand voice or changing the meaning of the original message.
They can optimize titles, descriptions, blog posts, social messages, and calls to action to make your content appealing to both crawlers and the human audience. And this is what iSEO is all about.
The bottom line
While very similar to SEO, international search engine optimization comes with a different set of challenges for marketers and SEO experts. It’s a form of SEO that is implemented during a complex localization process. You need to adapt your content and your strategies to every local audience that you target.
For successful iSEO, you need to go beyond the technical issues of multilingual websites and curate the cultural elements that make communication possible. That’s a job that SEO experts can’t do without the guidance of linguists and language experts.
Many SEO agencies tend to ignore the cultural part, mostly because they can’t do it. They don’t have the linguistic and cultural background necessary to reach local audiences. However, this isn’t the right place to cut corners, as you can’t communicate without the proper understanding of your target audience.