One of the main goals as a blogger has been, and probably for you too, to get more traffic.
At the beginning this could be a very stressful thing, because you start giving up your time on learning how to use WordPress, how to write content, and then it gets frustrating to see the low number of visitors.
All the effort, for nothing!
As you keep learning of this amazing world of digital marketing and WordPress, you learn that it is a matter of practice and consistent work
Website are not build up from one day to the other.
For me, one way for looking to get new visitors was to expand the language of my content.
At the beginning having the content only in spanish, would have closed me to just spanish readers. So eventually, I also created content in english.
Using translation plugins in WordPress has been really easy to have a multilingual website.
So adding WPML or even later trying Weglot, were key plugins to also learn more about an International SEO Strategy.
As I started to develop my website and having more visitors from different places of the world, I realized also how important was to take care about International SEO.
One of my pillar content is The Enterpreneurial Process Stages. If this piece of content was not in english, I wouldn’t receive the constant traffic I have from search engines.
So I decided to translate key posts in other languages, and it has helped me to improve my traffic from different countries.
Setting up the Href Canonical Tags, translating the Metadata and URL Slugs, have been just one small part of it.
I have to say I don’t consider myself a SEO Specialist, but my numbers are rising worldwide.
So I recommend you, have your website indexed in Search Console, Bing, Yandex or even Baidu, have your target in mind, activate some plugins such as Rankmath for SEO, install plugins such as WPML or Weglot for translations, and aim your content for the market of your desire.
I hope that the following International SEO Strategy helps you to reach international markets.
One of the biggest challenges is to make your multilingual website SEO-ready as there are many previous actions you must do to avoid problems that can complicate your SEO ranking.
How can I plan an International SEO Strategy? You may ask yourself. Discover below some guidelines, recommendations and theories that you probably didn’t know before implementing SEO on your website.
There are many occasions when adapting a multilingual website can be one of the best options you have if you want to improve results both in your positioning, and for your users in general.
Because your users may have many difficulties in reading or understanding your content if it is not in the language of their preference and can apply to many websites of different topics.
The benefits of making your website multilingual and SEO ready are many, in principle your users will be more comfortable in a website where they can enjoy the content and also refers to it being in their language.
In turn, this will help you get better user retention, which helps Google positioning and in turn gets more traffic.
Many experts can tell you that making your website multilingual SEO-ready is not always the best thing to do and they are right.
It is a complete waste of time to worry about having a website with adapted language if the website is just starting.
Everything must be done step by step and not “running over” the process or we will end up hurting the website instead of benefiting it.
There is no exact number of traffic from other countries for you to start thinking about making your multilingual website SEO-ready, but the ideal is 15% traffic from another language to think about expansion.
If this is your case, take a look at the first steps to make your website multilingual without any problems and in an objective way to start your International SEO Strategy.
When beginning with an International SEO Strategy, some might believe that it is only a matter of implementing a plugin or multilingual tool on our website and that’s it, we would already have optimized SEO in another language, among other aspects since it translates automatically.
And the reality is that this is not the case, we must be attentive to the following points in order to do it correctly and not generate errors that little by little will damage our SEO or the web in general.
We had already talked about it in previous points and we repeat it to make clear its importance: We must have at least 15% of traffic from another language to make my website ready for SEO.
To do this, we can use the Search Console, among other tools, to verify where our traffic comes from, if on top of that we have very little retention, you know what the problem is.
It doesn’t have much to do with the subject matter, any topic can be translated or adapted to different languages, however, it is a time and money consuming process that you don’t want to risk.
Once this condition is met, you are ready for the second step: Choose a favorite WordPress translation plug-in, among many alternatives.
This is a step that you have to consider if you are working with WordPress.
It is recommended to have a SEO Plugin.
I recommend Rankmath, over Yoast, since it adds more features such as the Schema Markups.
Rankmath is compatibile with many other WordPress plugins, including the translation.
With Rankmath you can eventually translate URLs, MetaData and have your content analyzed.
You can currently find a large number of free and paid plugins and options for translating your multilingual website ready for SEO that you will surely want to try.
Currently two of the best options are WPML and WeGlot.
WPML offers more control over translations, as well as automatic translations made with Deepl, while Weglot is a translation plugin that offers a very efficient and fast translation.
You can also consider hiring a translator so that he can redo the websites in a more secure way than what you want to transmit, since these plugins can have grammar, spelling errors, or may lack of real content localization.
But, it would only be feasible for small websites or for you to do a last revision before updating your website with the new language.
It can be one of the best decisions you make.
These plugins will help you to translate important information such as MetaData, HREF Canonical Tags, and URL Slugs.
Before making further work with your International SEO Strategy, make sure everything is correct as you may find many errors in the translated pages.
Remember that these are programs or plugins that can make grammatical or spelling mistakes, but using another language you can only use a person you trust to help you or do it yourself if you know the language.
Also check that your website topics have not had errors with the plugins and that all details have not been affected after this translation.
Once you have checked everything, you will have a multilingual website ready for SEO.
One of the most frequent mistakes when adapting different languages to your website is wanting to do everything instantly.
Understand that it is a development that must take time to be done correctly.
Secondly, it is important to check one language before moving on to the other.
Well, it’s easier to correct a mistake in one of the levels that you know where it is than to try to guess “which language is producing errors”.
With all this, you know how to make your multilingual website SEO-ready with an International SEO strategy.
Apply it whenever you can and you will see better results.
Best International SEO tips are:
International SEO is important for all those websites that are aiming for new international markets to increase search engines traffic and ultimately sales.