The first phase of planning your multilingual web presence is to translate the content. In addition to web content, this also includes translating the entire range of navigation and control elements in a way that is easily understandable to an international audience. Depending on the extent of the changes to be made and your company’s available resources, it usually makes sense to hire additional staff for this purpose. In addition to translating the online content, you should consider extending other areas of your team, such as customer support. Other points to consider early on include developing language-specific marketing campaigns, link building, and establishing appropriate technical structures (i.e., webhosting, domain names, SSL certification, etc.). It’s also important to ensure that you can easily add multilingual content with your chosen CMS.
Once you have these areas covered, you can get to grips with the all-important task of international SEO. This involves the translation and adaptation of the keywords and URLs as well as technical elements such as the development of the appropriate page structure or the correct linking and forwarding.
In Western Europe and the United States, Google is the research tool of choice for various optimization processes. However, if your internalization processes involve extending your online project to Eastern European and Asian markets, you need to consider performing SEO measures for other search engines. For example, In Russia, the most popular search engine platform is Yandex. Meanwhile, internet users in China primarily use Baidu and Japanese users tend to prefer Yahoo. The importance of Amazon’s search engine also increases for SEO in e-commerce.
A multilingual website only works if you have a corresponding, scalable staff structure and a strategy for the handling different languages or countries. There should be no cutting corners here, as this will eventually show progress down and could ultimately cost you your reputation. When internationalizing your web project, it’s crucial to execute the first steps thoroughly and seamlessly; the big plus here is your business could stand to gain a prestigious status in doing so. On the other hand, as mentioned above, if the implementation of your project is weak, it is likely to have a negative effect on both potential and existing customer's confidence. Read on for a summary of what to look out for when implementing SEO for multilingual websites and the most common mistakes made by companies.