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As an entrepreneur tapping the global market, it is important that your website speaks the language of your target consumers. So, to be understood by your clients, you must localize your website in accordance to your market’s tongue. But having a multilingual website is not enough to penetrate the foreign market. The localized content ought to be seen by the local patrons. Therefore, when you translate your website to the language of your target market, it should not only converse with their dialect because local search engines also need to see your website so that your products/services can be noticed by specific website users. For this reason, search engine optimization should be included in the process of language translation. Hence, the idea of SEO Localization comes in.

What is SEO Localization?

SEO Localization is a process in which the requirements of language localization are being combined with search engine optimization requisites. In layman’s term, SEO Localization can be described as the process of making the content relevant to the local website users reached via local search engines.

Although English is considered as the universal language and the lingua franca of the World Wide Web because most of the websites are written in English, the emergence of other vehicular languages on the internet such as Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Arabic, French, Russian and Korean only shows that 73.2% of the internet users worldwide are still into using their mother tongue when surfing the net. Therefore, no one can deny the need of multilingual website for someone who is targeting the international market in which the primary language is not English. And for any businessmen who are entering the foreign region must not only mull over a multilingual website per se, but they must also consider SEO Localization as part of their online marketing campaign.

Applying SEO on a Multilingual Website

1. Localizing the keywords. Identifying the keywords used by local searches is the first step in SEO Localization and must be applied before translating your website. Using the relevant local keywords in your content allows the local search engines to index your multilingual website, thus giving more traffic and better rankings. Hence, to effectively utilize the local keywords, these must be also indicated in the title tags and Meta tags.
2. Content localization. Aside from being aware of the cultural and linguistic complexities of foreign countries, content localization should go beyond the translation of words. The main notion here is to provide true value to the web users by developing relevant and exact information based on their geographical location. Through this, the tendency of your site to be seen on organic searches in those areas becomes higher, plus the possibility of improving the conversion rate because your multilingual website speaks to market’s demands. You may also add your business address on every page or mention other areas you are serving in your content to take advantage of SEO Localization.
3. Local Links. Create a link connection to local pages such as local versions of Google or Yahoo, local online directories, local blogs or informational sites about specific countries. However, see to it that these pages are relevant to your target area.
4. Adopt a local domain, IP address, and hosting provider. To get a better ranking in your target country, you may adopt a local domain for your multilingual website. Also, translating your URL into a specific language and using a local IP host can help your site rank on local search engines.

Tags: Multilingual, multilingual web development, multilingual website, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO localization, SEO Philippines, website localization