Multilingual SEO and Content Creation for Google's Algorithm

Ranking on search engines with mediocre or hastily written content is a thing of the past.

These days, companies (especially global ones) need to create quality content specific to each of their target markets to optimize search engine results. Quality content refers to the topics you choose to write about and the translation or data creation methods you select to articulate your ideas. Both considerations are critical to reaching your target. And, since your intended audience rarely looks for you specifically, you need to be strategic to get to the top of the search list once an online query has been made.

Content Ideation: Where Do You Start?

When developing your content creation strategy, figure out what your customers want to know. Brendan Walsh, Lionbridge’s Global Search expert, trains employees at global brands to achieve exceptional SEO results.

“It’s critical for content to be data-driven by market. That’s the way to ensure relevance to your audience and ultimately generate the results you seek,” says Walsh.

Here are his biggest tips:

• Figure out what people are asking in each region you target using Google to research popular queries.
• Build a list of those questions and arrange them into a grouping.
• Use that grouping to generate ideas for your blog, social media posts, or website.

Companies operating in multiple markets should recognize that the same topic will often yield numerous results due to market differences. For instance, a company researching electric cars may find that people from Los Angeles care about emissions standards while those from Quebec focus on performance during wintry weather. The same topic can produce wildly different query questions, which will dictate your regional content.

How Can You Achieve Multilingual SEO?

Organizations that operate globally and deal with multiple languages will undoubtedly have added challenges compared to companies focusing on one local region. According to Walsh, quality content is so crucial to search engine optimization that companies should strive to create original content in each language that answers users' questions. The gold standard is in-market, data-driven content creation. Nonetheless, he adds that other useful methods can be part of the solution.

Next in effectiveness is transcreation, the process of recreating content for a target language and market while preserving its creative and emotional appeal. Finally, while translation may have to take a bit of a back seat, there will still be a place for it. Ultimately, global companies may use a combination of these methods to meet their needs.

Lionbridge offers in-market evaluation services and can determine the best combination of in-market content creation, transcreation, and translation to achieve the most cost-effective, successful SEO results.

Where Are the Biggest Opportunities When Building a Content Creation Strategy?

It may seem daunting to get noticed among a sea of content. After all, there is only one winner for voice searches. It’s the one entry that your personal assistant chooses to tell you about. And in text searches, clicks drop significantly if you don’t reach the top five positions.

As you develop a content creation strategy, it’s worth noting that English is the dominant online language. According to Statista, English accounts for 52% of all online content. However, most of the world does not speak English, and even fewer speak English as their first language. As such, there is a content gap for languages outside of English.

Not only is there a gap in content outside of English, but quality is lacking in the existing content. That’s because so much of this content is translated from English rather than designed for the market.

Global companies that focus on creating quality content for their non-English markets have the opportunity to make significant inroads into their target audiences, whether that content is created by humans or via generative AI.

What’s at Stake if You Fail to Evolve?

We use cutting-edge human-in-the-loop AI translation to create great content and maximize our customers’ multilingual SEO. If you fail to evolve and enhance your content, you’ll lose traffic to other companies that will personalize content for local audiences. If you create worthwhile content, people will use it.

Get in Touch

If you use Lionbridge, quality content is available in every language. Contact a Lionbridge sales representative today to get additional information about our global SEO services and more.