The importance of translation in your SEO strategy
To win new market shares, especially internationally, with your website, you must think about everything, and well in advance of your online business strategy.
Combining the translation of your web pages and your content optimization for search engines is undoubtedly the best way to increase your traffic and to reach new audiences abroad. But this calls for prior fulfilling certain conditions and precautions beforehand.
Write quality « web content »
Make sure first and foremost that the editorial content of your website demonstrates your expertise, and incorporates the keywords under which you want to be found in the search results carried out by your potential customers. For this to be possible, you should adhere to certain rules.
Of course, you should convince your readers with good content, which is targeted. You can also adjust the length of your texts to the subject (if a 400-word document is enough in some instances, one must bear in mind that texts which appear in Google top positions have in average 1800 words). You can choose your keywords for a good referencing on search engines. You could also highlight key information in your texts.
Do not hesitate to insert links to other pages inside your contents, for indeed, the more your readers will click on your links, the better your page indexing will be by search engines. You can share your content (especially via social networks) because a good article is a shared article. Eventually you have to implement editorial planning (i.e. define how often you agree to write your articles, for example, one per week).
It should also be noted that « SEO content » means: any content created to draw the traffic from search engines. It may be, for example, informational (a blog post, a slideshow, computer graphics), or commercial (it can take the form of a video, a guide or a comparison between products/services).
Optimized SEO
Writing for the web must also be able to satisfy both human internet users, us, and robots…It is, therefore, necessary to optimize your content, meaning that you must stand out from the crowd to appear among the first positions in search results, and to improve the position of your website in search engines.
For this, it is important to use a lexical field which is appropriate, hence the importance of having your content translated by a native – and to choose the most important terms.
Your content must be layered and structured.
The most important information must be included in the titles of your texts (called H for heading), tags (a means for algorithms to understand and differentiate content data), and a quick summary of your content (in average 50 words).
And all this must be well considered in advance to be able to provide the best SEO content. The right words, the right number, and in the right place.
Some specialists in optimization for search engines even say that Google is a « maniac for texts». It should also be pointed out that algorithms identify both spelling and grammar mistakes as well as what is called over-optimization (a text which is excessively laden with keywords, or « keyword stuffing »).
And if you do not follow the above criteria, you may be knocked from search engines because you may be considered a « spammer ».
Translation/ adaptation of your website (Localization of your website)
Last but not least, it is necessary to do things with professionalism, and not simply use an automatic translation despite the dazzling success of new automated systems, with the risk of missing the context.
It is therefore essential that you choose the appropriate terminology and consider your target: a term which is 100% correct in French (for example « voiture ») may be the subject of high-volume online searches in France but not in Quebec (where to name an automobile they will more commonly use the word « char »).
That is why marketing and communication agencies work with linguists whose target language is not only their mother tongue but who also live or have lived, in the particular market you are targeting.
They have a thorough knowledge of their own culture, as well as of its ramifications (ex. French culture in metropolitan France and Creole culture in the French West Indies).
And even if your website is written in the correct language, but your keywords are not adapted to the selected market, you won’t appear in their search results.
This means that the more you anticipate in thinking about the three above-mentioned aspects, the better and more efficient your international development strategy will likely be.