How Multilingual Website Affect SEO Results

Translating a site into a local language keeping in mind the demands of the potential audience boost the traffic to the site. It not only helps to increase the conversion, but also helps increase the site’s accessibility. However, multilingual sites open the website to millions of new customers and it contributes to good SEO and helps to improve the overall user experience.

Website owners often consider the various factors to make the site available in multiple languages and they are also aware of the fact that developing a multilingual website can help to improve their Search engine optimisation efforts. But for this, you need to structure your multilingual site properly and ensure that you have the right tool for creating the multilingual website.

Multilingual sites and SEO:

A quick search in any search engine will teach you the importance of creating a multiple language website.  Creating a multi-language site means that you will be creating a duplicate version of the content, but not all duplicate content is detrimental. Any content that appears within multiple URLs may often lead to search engine penalties as it reduces the rankings and even penalises.

In order to avoid duplicate content penalties, Google recommends some best practices by using dedicated URLs that are the language indicator. This indicator enables the search engines and the users to easily identify the language from the URL itself. The placement of the language indicator in the URL is based on the domain structure that you choose.      

SEO benefits of translating your site into multiple languages:

Most websites consider English as their primary language, and it is true that an enormous majority of people speak and understand English across the globe compared to any other language. But another truth is that there are many other languages which are highly popular, but website owners often consider English and neglect the others because of lack of information.

Now targeting these languages will of course help to increase the audience base and they can enjoy plenty of benefits by stepping outside their narrow mindset. Here is how it can improve your SEO:

Search engine optimization is a crucial process to ensure that your site is visible and appears in the search engine result page (SERP). The higher the ranking of your site, the higher your pages will appear for the chosen keywords.

Also Read: Why a Multilingual Website Outsourcing Agency is Preferred Over Machine Translation

Translated versions of the site into a specific language improve the local SEO ranking:

If you have multilingual websites and each has their own unique URL, then the search engines will read both separately, but if you use a subdomain or subdirectory, then the search engine will read both the versions as part of the main website. This means that the traffic that you attract from different versions will help to improve the ranking of the whole site. 

It also helps the search engines to understand your site in a better manner and it is clear which languages you will be providing content with. This helps to boost the SEO. So make sure that your structure and translated versions are as per Google’s guidance.

Better engagement and more traffic also means higher ranking:

Search engines often give more value to quality content and user engagement. Creating a multilingual website often means more traffic and local language always keeps the visitors engaged.  This makes Google highly satisfied with the website and this ultimately results in higher ranking of the site.

Multilingual sites make it easy to target specific regions:

A Multilanguage site allows you to reach out to your international audiences easily and also target local visitors. But everything depends a lot on the keyword research for the language that you want to use and for this Google Analytics can help. This will ensure that your site is visible with the keywords that are used by the users from that specific location.

Summary:

Offering a website’s content in multiple languages help to ensure growth and your potential audience, thereby leading to increased conversions.