Role of multilingual / international SEO

In today’s digital era, businesses benefit from expanding their online presence and reaching out to a global audience.But to achieve this goal and make your site discoverable to people across different geographies, it is vital to include multilingual or international search engine optimization (SEO) as a critical process to scale up your business and reach the target foreign market.

Research claims that almost 65% prefer content in their language and nearly 40% of global consumers refrain from buying a product that is listed in a language other than their own. Hence website optimization is needed to cater to international visitors in your niche areas. Incorporating a multi-language SEO strategy in your international marketing and business requires the XML sitemap to be transformed from a simple to a complex process to serve a larger audience. Multilingual SEO optimizes the content on your website for different languages to ensure that your website becomes searchable in new markets, and people in different countries can find your website easily through organic search. In other words, to optimize your site for native speakers of languages in other countries, multilingual SEO is needed.

In this post, we discuss how you can generate a multilingual sitemap that can help improve your site's visibility to an international audience.

Key SEO Tips for Your Multilingual Website in 2023 and Beyond

To tap into the huge potential of the international and multilingual market, you must follow some best practices to set up your SEO strategy. Here are some actionable steps you can take to change your content marketing localization strategy for good to usher in more traffic to your multi-language site.

Plan your strategy
First, understand your audience, their search habits, and where your website traffic is coming from, and start with that country first. Consider the languages of your target countries, and make sure you have specific solutions to provide customized services – translate your content and your SEO metadata accordingly. Consider the following for better planning:

• Social media – Figure out their social media preferences and how you can leverage that to boost your website’s SEO.
• Search terms – Analyze search terms to tweak your content strategy to attract more audience.
• Link-building – Understand how you can do more link-building in the target countries and multi-language markets.
• Domain name – Your domain name is your website’s identity; as per the requirement, see if you need to change it to a different language, or if your brand name is recognizable.
• Visitor statistics – Leverage Google Analytics and geotargeting to identify the origin of your website’s traffic, the percentage of searchers, and decide your desired percentage accordingly.
• E-commerce – As your online store caters to global clients, it is important to consider their currencies and how your products can bridge the gap and penetrate further in the international market.  

Perform competitor analysis

Research your competitors and measure their performance with SEO, content marketing, and digital marketing. Global SEO helps you to find opportunities and stay ahead, especially if your competitors are yet to optimize their content.

Choose search engine wisely

There are countries where search engines other than Google exists. Regional search engines, like Naver (South Korea, Baidu (China), and Yandex (Russia) will help you to reach native users easily. So,  take your time and research to select the right option.

Boost multilingual SEO

Ensure to optimize your site’s search engine rankings with these easy tips.

• Dedicated URLs – Google recommends using dedicated URLs with the language indicator because it enables users and search engines to identify the language from the URL alone.
• Hreflang attributes – Used to help determine both the language of the page and the region it is intended for. For example, for English speakers from America and English speakers from the United Kingdom, the hreflang tag ensures that the viewers are served the intended (localized) version of the site. You can implement the hreflang tags in your XML sitemap markup, or on the HTTP headers.
• Page load speed –  A fast landing website page directly influences the amount of traffic it gets for your multilingual SEO.
• Metadata – Your Metadata (titles and meta descriptions) is crucial as it helps a website to rank better for your target countries.

Avoid redirecting users to a different language based on location

Redirecting visitors based on their IP addresses or browser settings is not recommended as it spoils the user experience and confuses search engines. Instead, inform them about an alternative version through an on-page banner with a message and a link to the desired URL.

Implementing Multilingual Sitemaps For Each Market

Mostly, there are two ways to execute multi-language sitemaps for your website SEO – using either a global sitemap or having several sitemaps for each country’s language.

For example, if your website URL is http://www.example.com, it is recommended to take care of the URL structure for multilingual sitemaps. Each version of the website should possess a specific language-country code in the URL such as:

http://www.example.com/en/index.html – English version of the website
http://www. example.com/us/en/index.html – United States English version
http://www. example.com/be/fe/index.html – the French version of the site

Global SEO Checklist

Content optimization and localization for different countries increases your search presence, strengthens your brand image, fosters lead generation, and boosts your Return on Investment (ROI). This checklist will ensure that you do not miss a thing in your global SEO effort:

• Create an HREFLang XML sitemap
• Allow users to switch to their preferred webpage language
• Create a keyword strategy using relevant keywords for a particular market
• Set up a global SEO-friendly URL structure
• Detect redirects and fix them
• Determine an apt link-building strategy for each market
• Use Hreflang tags to build an ideal framework for an SEO-friendly website
• Fix crawl issues and broken links
• Constantly update on international and local search trends
• Formulate a global content strategy
• Hire local content creators and industry experts to remain relevant

The Way Forward

Formulating a multilingual SEO strategy can be tricky sometimes but not with the best practices and tips mentioned above.

However, the most important thing is to choose the right HREFLang XML sitemap generator tool that will help your international SEO team to easily create a multilingual XML sitemap for your site. With a HREFLang XML sitemap generator like HREFLang optimizer, you can not only create sitemaps for your large website, but also automate the process to avoid some serious errors that may prove harmful for your international seo strategy. If you have a smaller website, you can easily create XML sitemaps with this FREE sitemap generator tool and also perform your SEO audits in no time.

If you need help with implementing these elements to set up your brand presence, our multilingual SEO experts will be happy to help you, now and always.