5 Multilingual SEO Best Practices to Follow in 2020

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5 Multilingual SEO Best Practices to Follow in
2020
Considering several SEO factors is important
while setting up a multilingual store. This is
because good multilingual SEO helps improve rank
of your site higher and overall user
experience. Multilingual SEO is the act of
optimizing content on your website for different
languages to become searchable in new markets and
make your site findable among people from
different countries. A Magento 2 Multi-Language
extension or any other based on your ecommerce
platform can help translate the store. Note
Though Google Translate can help, translation of
your store for non-English speaking countries
wont be accurate and fully practical. Instead, a
properly planned multilingual SEO strategy that
uses a Magento 2 Language Switcher or any other
plugin can give far better results. There are,
however, several tips to ensure proper and
effective SEO. So, lets read on...
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Plan out Your Multilingual SEO Strategy Consider
the search habits of your audience from target
countries. They might be different from those in
your native country. Ensure that you have a
solution that translates your content and
metadata into your audiences native
languages. To help translate content more
effectively and accommodate the differences,
consider ? Surfing and using social media to
support your on-site SEO. ? Using backlinks in
your target countries and multilingual
markets. ? Using proper content strategy and
search terms - adding new content for
international audiences. ? Assessing visitor
statistics using Google Analytics to find out
which countries your traffic is coming from,
calculating the percentage, and comparing it with
your target percentage traffic from a particular
country. ? Considering currencies and how
products meet the needs of different markets and
localizing SEO in case you run an international
ecommerce store. ? Thinking of a good domain
name that could be either different in different
languages or a unique one recognizable by
non-English speakers also. ? Testing how your
search engine results pages look in different
categories and in different versions of Google
search. Once you have planned out an effective
SEO strategy, follow the common tips given below
to optimize your multilingual SEO further.
5 Multilingual SEO Best Practices 1. Use
Dedicated URLs
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Duplicacy of content is one of the main concerns
of a multilingual site. While not all duplicate
content is harmful, content that appears within
multiple URLs can lead to penalties like lowered
rankings or even de-indexing.
To prevent duplicate content penalties, use
dedicated URLs including a language indicator
each, as recommended by Googles best
practices. The indicator helps search engines
and users to identify the language from the URL
itself. For instance, if your original page is
www.mystore.com, the URL for its French version
can be www.mystore.com/fr/ where /fr/ is the
language indicator. Again, you can place this
language indicator in the URL in three ways as
follows. ? Top level domain (e.g. www.mystore.fr)
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• ? Subdomain (e.g. www.fr.mystore.com)
• ? Subdirectory (e.g. www.mystore.com/fr/)
• At times, search engines might interpret even a
  language indicator as well. Therefore, ensure
  that your site is SEO-compatible.
• Related 5 Points to Consider Before Translating
  a Website
• Apply hreflang Tags and Product Attributes
• Besides language indicators, Google also uses
  hreflang attributes to help determine the
  language of the page and its target region. As
  tags are based on the selection of locale as per
  your store view. So, ensure that you select a
  proper locale for your store view so you can add
  an HTML language attribute-based on your locale.
• You can insert these tags in the header section
  of the original page or submit them via a
  sitemap. For example, an hreflang tag referencing
  a French page intended for readers in the USA
  could look like this
• lt link relalternate hreflangfr-us
  hrefhttp//mystore.com/fr/ gt
• If a page has to target multiple regions, you can
  also add multiple hreflang attributes. However,
  as the count of target regions goes high, adding
  attributes becomes more difficult.
• Our Magento 2 Language Switcher can help in this
  way. It helps you keep your product attributes
  like meta-attributes, meta-description, name,
  short description, etc. updated.

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1? The main content is translated but the
navigation text is in the original language. 2?
User generated content (like forum discussions
and comments) are in different languages. In
both these cases, you can specify the intended
language and region by adding the hreflang tags
as discussed above. However, multiple languages
on a page could impact the user experience. ? In
the first case, the reader might understand the
main content but face trouble navigating to
other pages. ? In the second case,
user-generated content in different languages
could result in loss of context in discussions
and leave the reader confused or
frustrated. Fortunately, with our Magento 2
Language Switcher, you can translate any CMS
page and exercise full control over CMS page
fields like meta-details or content. 4.
Translate your metadata Ensure to translate your
metadata also besides site content. As it is a
valuable piece of text that will help you rank
better in your target countries. But its
translation is not as easy as translating
metadata word for word. The word that might be a
keyword in your sites primary language (original
language) may be different in your translated
site. This implies that a new keyword research
into your target markets is of vital importance.
And youll need to do that first! Keyword
explorer tools like Ahrefs or Ubersuggest can
help you with that. Enter a translated keyword,
select your target country, and review the
results to get better insights into what your
potential customers might search.
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5. Ensure to Keep Site Loading Speed High
As per a Google survey conducted in 2018, the
probability of bounce increases by 32 as the
page load time goes from 1s to 3s. As your
website loading time is one of the key ranking
factors for search engines, you cant afford to
lose your website traffic to your competitors
due to poor speed. Hence, ensuring to make your
website load faster matters a lot. There are a
number of ways you can use to increase the
website loading speed significantly. ? Use a
plugin for page caching ? Set up browser
caching ? Integrate a CDN with your site
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? Optimize the size of images without losing
quality Another effective way of making your
website load faster is choosing the right
hosting plan. Generally, in cheaper hosting
plans, your website shares server resources with
multiple other websites which results in slower
loading. If your budget allows, go for the
hosting plans that offer dedicated servers for
your site. Conclusion Considering the best SEO
practices while creating a multilingual site can
go a long way towards engaging your customers
and building your brand image in the
international market. Our Magento 2 Multi
Language Extension can help you translate your
store into multiple languages and achieve
business growth. To know more about its features
or integrate, contact us at sales_at_appjetty.com
and our sales team will get in touch with you
within 24 hours. Original Blog
https//www.appjetty.com/blog/multilingual-seo-bes
t-practices/