If you need to increase your international website traffic, then applying a WordPress Multilingual SEO could be a strategy that you can follow.
Keep reading to learn some tips that can help you to build your own WordPresss Multilingual SEO strategy on a practical level.
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 WordPress 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 having a WordPress Multilingual 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 WordPress Multilingual SEO tips helps you to reach international markets.
As I have recommended a lot, the use of a translation plugins is a requirement in any WordPress website to turn it multilingual.
My website currently uses WPML, but I have also used WPGlobus and Weglot on it.
When I started with WPGlobus, it was a free an easy to use plugin, but as I started to learn more about wordpress multilingual SEO, then I decided to change to WPML.
WPML is one of the most known and used wordpress translation plugins, because it is compatible with most of other wordpress plugins, plus it is really to use and it is improving.
WPML and DeepL is a current integration that has improved WordPress automatic translation.
Deepl for sure has improved the accuracy of the translations, so you still have to do minor corrections, but it is way better than other translation engines such as Google Translator.
With WPML you can be sure that you will cover main aspects of a WordPress Multilingual SEO strategy, such as translating Titles and Descriptions meta data, URL structure, URL slug, Hrefs and Sitemap automatic set up.
Weglot is another really good translation plugin for WordPress. I used it for one year and it was really easy and fast to use.
The translation accuracy was really high and it was done almost at the instant.
You can keep reading the WPML vs Weglot to decided which one is the best for you.
I stopped using Weglot, because I reached the word count limit that they have so I either get a better plan or change back to WPML.
Since I had to pay more, I decided to go back to WPML, but as it keep improving with Deepl, the automatic translation is getting better.
But probably for a Woocommerce website Weglot will be a better option, since the translation plugin will not mess with any other plugin since it is connected via API.
Weglot also takes care of the translation of the titles and descriptions meta data, hrefs and canonical tags as well as the sitemap.
It is worth mentioning that to be able to have different URL Structures and URL Slugs, you will need to have the Advanced Plan. With Weglot you can have subfolders, but in case you want more subdomains or separate domains, you should also have at least Pro plan.
Probably the other base thing to consider besides installing a wordpress translation plugin is a SEO wordpress plugin.
And the best wordpress SEO plugin available is Rank Math Pro.
You can visit different SEO Facebook groups, and most users are already stating that Rank Math, even in its free version is better when we compare Rank Math vs Yoast.
Rank Math helps you out with the basic SEO, such as Titles, description, sitemaps, redirections, schema markup, instant indexing with Bing and Search Console.
Also, Rank Math is compatible with translation plugins that will help you with the WordPress Multilingual SEO.
To keep up the tips of the WordPress Multilingual SEO, I will show you the configurations that you can do with WPML.
If you have a big budget, it could be better to have your website with different domain languages such as:
But for this, you will require a big team that can take care of each domain.
This way, you are targeting your domain to a country in specific. This are called ccTLD – country specific top level domain.
Take into consideration that the Domain Authority will be considered independent from each other, therefore also the backlink efforts you do will give the link juice to only that domain, so this could be a disadvantage.
The Subfolder URL structure could be one of the most accepted strategy in the International SEO community, since you are keeping all your content under one domain.
In this site structure, the website will be geolocated in a specific subdirectory that will belong to a root domain, which allows you to easily inherit its authority without having to start from scratch.
Your geographic target will be oriented towards the specific language. Example www.sample.com/es
This is the most recommended to keep the SEO power of your link building at one domain.
On the installation I now recommend to use the advanced translation editor of WPML, since it has a better user interface and it is the way to use the automatic translation.
In the settings area you can do the changes if you had the classic editor.
If you go further down, you would also want to change on the Translate documents options Page Url to translate.
By doing this configuration you can translate the URL Slug from the Advanced Editor.
Another important aspects about the WordPress Multilingual SEO is the translation of Title and Description of the metadata.
You can easily set up the Title and the Description that you have written in your Rank Math plugin, and it will appear on the Advanced Editor.
You can to the translation manually or automatically and do after the corrections if needed.
Sometimes the keywords might not be exactly in the same sense when translate, so it will be recommended to do keyword adaptations according to the user intent of search.
Another important aspect to avoid duplicated content and also to tell crawlers that there is another page version in another language is the use of Hreflangs.
As you can see in the image in my example the Hreflangs are stating that I have an english and spanish version of the post and it also shows the respective translate URL.
Here there is no manual action to do in WPML, since it is set up atuomatically.
Also, if you are using Rank Math, the sitemap is properly structured by WPML.
As any other SEO strategy, even if its a WordPress Multilingual SEO, it is to gain international backlinks.
Even when I was creating content in different languages, I started to see a better impact on my search engines results when I also focused on back links.
There are different websites that help with backlinks.
For UK & USA there are websites such as Fat Joe or the Hoth.
For the spanish speaking countries there is Publisuites or Getlinko.
It will be a matter of research per country to know which websites can help you with this important part of SEO, but it is recommended to aim for backlinks from the country that you are aiming.
I hope that his WordPress Multilingual SEO tips have help you. If there are some missing please let me know.
