Enhancing your search rankings is one of the things you should be very interested in as a marketer or entrepreneur, and translating your content can help in many ways. For instance, translating your content can help increase your potential audience and amplify your engagement and conversions.
When using translations to enhance your search ranking, it is crucial that you not only make use of the correct tools but also structure your multilingual sites correctly according to Google’s best practices in order to avoid duplicate content penalties. One popular recommendation is the use of “dedicated URLs” that include appropriate language indicators in the html (called hreflang).
General Benefits of Translating Your Blog
Using English alone on your blog can sometimes mean it will get lost in the crowd during a user’s search. Since English is the most commonly spoken language by internet users, it is no surprise that over half of all websites provide their content in English.
However, you should (as an innovative entrepreneur) consider the untapped opportunities within the non-English speaking half of the world’s population. They are rapidly becoming more interested in benefiting from the internet, so you should consider the unlimited possibilities (in terms of reach, and earnings) this massive audience presents.
Let us consider these languages:
Spanish – over 500 million internet users speak this language; however, less than 5% of websites offer their content in Spanish.
Chinese – close to a billion internet users speak the language; similarly, however, less than 2% of websites offer content in Chinese.
For some people these stats may not seem compelling enough. However, when you consider the untapped benefits that could follow from exploiting this massive opportunity, then you will see what translating your site can do for your blog. For example:
Grow Your Audience: translating your blog will help you to be able to reach out to several billion internet users who are currently under-catered for, therefore opening up a wider audience and increased potential earnings.
Increase Trust: being able to communicate with users in a language they’re fluent in can help to increase trust. Also, this can help give your blog an edge over competitors in terms of Influencer and affiliate campaigns.
Win Ads: you can more easily create ads for your new audience, which means more revenue, and more earnings.
Win Engagement: users will more likely follow your blog because you’re not only presenting them with relevant content, but you’re also doing so in a language they understand. Hence your blog will sound more authentic to your users and ultimately win you their engagement/conversions.
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How Translating Your Blog Content Will Enhance Your Search Rankings
As mentioned earlier, making your blog accessible in multiple languages can really help improve your search rankings, win you more audiences, and increase your earnings.
Let’s take a look at the main reasons why translating your blog into different languages will help enhance your search rankings:
➢ Bigger Audience + More Engagement = Higher Rankings
In straightforward terms search engines like Google give more importance to quality content with good user engagement. Therefore, if your blog is consistent with producing quality content (that drives traffic), Google will notice and rank your pages higher as a result. If your page is in someones native language, they are more likely to engage – which will also increase your ranking in SERPs.
In the same way, if you provide relevant content in various languages, your blog(s) will gain traffic from various parts of the world (through localised versions of Google). Google will notice the language of your webpages and rank you higher in each location than pages not in the local language.
➢ Translated Versions Of Your Site Increase Ranking & Visibility On Search Engines
[This is the technical SEO version of the above!]
You can achieve higher search engine rankings by giving each translated version of your site its own unique subdomain, subdirectory, or unique URL. Let’s use a real-life example to see how we can achieve this –
Let’s say we have a blog, myblogrankings.com, and we have successfully made French and English translations of it. Now, we can give each translated version their own unique URL (using a different domain name for each). Therefore we could have something like this: myblogrankings.fr for the French version and myblogrankings.en for the English version.
Another way of achieving this is by using a subdomain or subdirectory, in which case we can have something like this: myblogrankings.com/fr/ for the French, and myblogrankings.com/en/ for the English version.
The result will be that whichever of these methods you use, search engines will automatically read the two versions as part of the same site.
In order to ensure that this works, some things need to be avoided:
- Avoid making an address that contains a hash (#) symbol in it.
- Avoid an address that uses cookies to determine the language.
- Avoid a translation solution that places all of the translated languages on the same page.
You can check out Google’s best practices for more assistance.
➢ You Can Target Specific Regions With Superior Accuracy
One of the most significant advantages of translating your site to become multilingual is the fact that you will be able to reach out to international audiences.
However, it is still essential to understand which people (niches) you want to target. One effective way to achieve this is by performing keyword research in the language(s) you have translated into. Another useful tool you can use to accomplish this is Google Analytics, which gives you data about high-traffic regions for your site.
Conclusion:
Multilingual sites are the best approach to achieving tremendous international results, including higher search rankings. Translating your content opens up an international audience to you and firmly puts you in a position to earn more from your blog, whether you’re a marketer, entrepreneur, or just looking to advertise online. You will also be able to get more customers to engage with your content, and even convert at higher levels.