Can translating your website into other languages boost your SEO?

Across the globe, people are using search engines to learn and discover new information.

Is your company appearing in these searches? If not, you’re potentially missing out on a lot of overseas business. Translation can be a huge digital marketing tool.

If you’re showing up for searches performed in French, for example, you’re opening yourself up to the French online marketplace. You’re also demonstrating to les Français that your business cares about securing their custom; you appear as a more credible potential business partner. People are more likely to part with their cash if you speak their language.

How do I achieve this all-important foreign language search presence, you may ask? Not with poorly-translated website content. To get in front of your overseas target audience, your content needs to contain keywords that they use.

So, the short answer — yes. Accurate, high-quality translation boosts your SEO and helps your website to rank higher on search engines.

How does good translation help my SEO?

Google uses incredibly complex algorithms to decide where a web page ranks in search results. However, we know that Google take cues from a range of things.

One of the most important is relevant keyword usage. If your translated content contains terms and vocabulary relevant to your industry or product (that searchers will also be using), Google will view it more favourably.

Does your content contain appropriate technical phrases relating to the subject matter at hand? If so, Google will deem it as more relevant — and will therefore rank it higher on results pages.

There’s also strong evidence to suggest that Google looks at spelling and grammatical accuracy of content when deciding how well a page will rank. If a page is riddled with errors, it is more likely to be penalised and pushed down the rankings.

So, to look authentic in the eyes of search engines, your translated website needs technical and linguistic accuracy. The best way to ensure this? Not with a slap-dash translation!

Hidden benefits…

With that stone of good translation, you can kill two, three, four or more birds.

StatCounter gives calculations of the global search engine ‘market share’. Across Western Europe and North America, Google leads the way, accounting for approximately 90% of all searches. Google also dominates in Mexico, Brazil, India, Japan, South Korea and more.

But this isn’t true everywhere.

In Russia, over half of all internet users choose to perform their daily searches with Yandex. In China, internet users generally opt for Baidu, accounting for over 74% of all searches, followed by Shenma at 11%.

That’s also not to discount the often-overlooked popularity of other search engines. Throughout the UK, France, Germany, Spain and so on, there’s a small but solid contingent who prefer to use search engines like Yahoo!, Bing and DuckDuckGo.

Search engine global market share (August 2019), StatCounter.

The good news: high-quality translation can boost your presence in all of them.

Looking to go global?

You need industry and linguistic experts translating your content — which is exactly what we specialise in at Alexika.

We provide professional translations to and from all major business languages of the world. We work across a wide range of sectors, and our translators are technical experts in their fields, as well as experts in translating marketing material for websites.

When assigning a translator to your project, we insist that they are a native speaker of the language you’ll be translating into. That way, all your rendered material reads as if it was created from scratch by a mother tongue speaker — it’s one of our golden rules.

Our friendly team would be delighted to talk about your next translation project. Make translation a cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy.