In the past few years, there has been a boom in SEO companies and interest in this new marketing strategy that works with search engines to grow your organic web traffic. However, traditionally, companies focus only on English SEO, but what happens to the rest of the Internet’s vast user base that doesn’t search in English?
Multilingual SEO it is not only about doing SEO in another language, it is about optimising your website/s and keyword phrases to the way that people in your target countries search.
What might be the money phrase in one language or country is likely to be of little worth in another. Therefore, cultural differences are very important. Two countries with the same language may use different keywords to search. For example, Spain and most countries of South America are Spanish speaking nations, but they use different words in many cases and different ways to elaborate their sentences – very important for multi-word search phrases.
What else should you take into consideration when thinking about International SEO? Even though Google dominates many English language searches, there are many people that doesn’t use Google. In China, the largest country in the world, Baidu and Tencent QQ have more than two thirds of the search market. In India, Rediff has become a very tough competitor for the North-American company. South Koreans use Naver and Russians have Yandex.
So the conclusion is clear, multilingual SEO goes hand in hand with internationalisation and global marketing strategies. If you want to grow you company abroad you will need to understand that if you want to be successful, you will need to immerse your marketing strategy into the local culture and language. You should use these to your advantage!
