Good news, there is less competition for keywords in languages that aren’t English,
so this should make it easier to get a foreign language site to rank, right? Actually, if you have a multilingual staff then yep, dead right. If you don’t then optimising in foreign languages may be a little tricky. However, it’s not impossible by any stretch, it can be rewarding and we’re going to provide you with a few tips to foreign language optimisation right here.
The Hard Work
All of the same principals of SEO apply in every country. This is good news, because it means that you know what you’re doing but it also means that there are very few shortcuts, the hard word needs to be done wherever you plan to do it. You need authority and backlinks so you need media exposure, you’ll need to write the odd guest blog and to participate in the online community with comment and observation as well. This is where that multilingual staff will come in handy. Oh yeah, if they happen to have knowledge of the culture in each country where you plan to operate, that will be helpful too. Online PR is a necessity everywhere but just because we do things one way here, doesn’t mean the Dutch or the Mongolian will respond in exactly the same way to your campaign,so do your research and take cultural differences into consideration.
The Cheeky Cheat
If you sit on the precipice of an international campaign, worried at the prospect of having to hire copywriters of all nationalities, don’t panic. There are shortcuts. The good news is that the duplicate content rule doesn’t apply to content written in different languages, so a blog post written in English, then translated and reposted in 10 different languages is classed as fresh content all 11 times.
Better still, Google Translate is a perfectly adequate tool for the creation of comments. You responses may not always be perfectly phrased but they’ll be readable and easily translated into any number of languages, saving you a pretty penny.
