Seven tips for a better multilingual SEO strategy
In e-commerce, selling your products worldwide represents a golden opportunity. But it doesn’t happen by magic! For your online store to benefit from optimal international visibility, you need to implement an efficient multilingual SEO strategy. Here are seven tips for creating an effective multilingual SEO ranking and promoting your e-commerce site worldwide.
What is multilingual SEO?
Multilingual SEO refers to the practices and techniques used to optimise a website in different languages. This allows businesses to reach an international audience and sell their products and/or services on a large scale.
A site with a solid multilingual SEO strategy will be just as easy to find on Google (via organic search) in India as it is in Germany, or Bali… But to achieve such results, certain best practices must be adopted.
🚨 Relying on machine translators like Google Translate is a quick, easy, and free solution for translating your website pages. But Google Translate isn’t SEO friendly.
Seven best practices for multilingual SEO
1. Choose the right URL structure
There are three approaches recommended for structuring URLs for multilingual sites. We’ll deep-dive them below, and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.
Country-specific domains (ccTLD)
📌 Example: mysite.de in Germany, mysite.fr in France, mysite.es in Spain, etc.
The advantages of this type of URL structure are the clear separation between sites and well-defined geographic targeting. However, this type of structure requires significant infrastructure and generates separate domain authorities. It may therefore not be the easiest option when it comes to tracking.
Subdomains with a generic top-level domain
📌 Example: de.mysite.com for Germany, fr.mysite.com for France, es.mysite.com for Spain, etc.
Here too, the distinction between sites is clear and easy. Furthermore, you only need one domain name to configure all versions of your site on the same domain.
Managing this type of structure is simpler when compared to the ccTLD. That said, we strongly recommend setting up your site’s geotargeting in Search Console ensuring the geolocation signal sent to Google is accurate.
Subdirectories with a generic top-level domain
📌 Example: mysite.com/de for Germany, mysite.com/fr for France, mysite.com/es for Spain, etc.
Subdirectories based on a gTLD domain represent the final URL structure option presented here. This easy-to-implement option requires little maintenance and gives you the advantage of shared domain authority. Plus, it allows you to easily use Search Console’s geotargeting. The only drawback is that the separation of the sites will be more complex.
💡 Each option presented has its own advantages and disadvantages and has a specific impact on SEO, user experience, and site maintenance requirements.
2. Carry out thorough keyword research
Country-specific keyword research is essential when it comes to building your multilingual SEO strategy. This will allow you to understand the search intentions of your customers and prospects based on their nationality.
Extensive keyword research allows you to put your translation needs into perspective. This will then make it easier for you to define the keywords to focus on for each version of your site.
⚒️ Ahrefs, Semrush and Ubersuggest are excellent tools for determining keyword search volume in different target languages.
3. Download the TextMaster translation plugin
Do you have more than a hundred pages on your site? Not sure how to automate the translation of your online store’s product pages?
The easiest wayis to download the TextMaster translation plugin. This will provide you with professional translation quality, much more accurate than what is delivered by machine translation software.
TextMaster can be integrated with many external solutions such as:
- PrestaShop
- Shopify
- Onebase
- SAP Hybris
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud
- Akeneo
- Magento
- Transifex
- Drupal
- WordPress
- Phrase
- Quable
- Localize
- and many other platforms!
Don’t see your CRM in this list? Discover all our translation plugins or contact us so we can find the most practical solution for you.
4. Apply hreflang tags
Hreflang tags are essential elements of a successful multilingual SEO strategy. They help search engines understand which versions of a page to display based on the user’s language and location. 📌
Example: If your site contains content in both US and UK English, hreflang tags will distinguish between these two versions. When someone in the UK scrolls through the site, they will see the site in UK English, while someone in Washington, DC, will see the US version.
Another key benefit of hreflang tags is that they help avoid penalties for duplicate content, protecting you from the dangers of multilingual plagiarism. Even if the content is similar or identical in different language versions, hreflang tags signal to search engines that the duplication is intentional and not manipulative.
5. Create a multilingual XML sitemap
A well-structured multilingual XML sitemap alerts search engines to the existence of multiple versions of the same page, making them easier to crawl and index. Furthermore, it makes the tags easier for search engines to interpret.
To build this type of sitemap, follow the below steps:
- add each language version of a URL with its corresponding hreflang attribute
- declare all language and region variants in the sitemap file
- submit the sitemap to Google Search Console to speed up indexing.
6. Translate your site’s metadata
To establish a solid multilingual SEO strategy, it is essential to translate metadata (titles, meta descriptions, ALT tags, etc.). This will improve the rankings of your pages in SERPs and optimise your CTR (click-through rate).
And yes: a well-translated meta description generates more clicks in users’ native languages.
📌 Example: Someone from Portugal will be more likely to click on a carefully written Portuguese result than on a less inviting English version.
7. Create strategic internal links
Finally, and we can’t stress this enough, internal linking is the key to SEO.
Links from your site to other pages on your site (called internal links) have no disadvantages, only upsides:
- they help search engines understand the structure of your site
- they distribute page authority across your site
- they improve the user experience
As a multilingual website manager, it is essential to ensure internal links lead to the correct language version of a page. If you redirect a Swedish visitor to an Italian page for example, it risks driving them away, which is not desirable for SEO.
Creating a successful multilingual SEO strategy: Recap
In summary, a well-designed multilingual SEO strategy is a real lever for boosting the visibility of your e-commerce site internationally.
Here’s a recap of the best practices to implement:
- choose the right URL structure
- conduct in-depth keyword research
- download the TextMaster translation plugin
- apply hreflang tags
- create a multilingual XML sitemap
- translate your site’s metadata
- create strategic internal links
Finally, remember the key to success lies in continuous adaptation and performance measurement. Be sure to analyse the results of your multilingual SEO strategy regularly and do so for each target country. This is your way forward and the path to conquering the e-commerce world! 🌍
Need a reliable, professional and experienced service provider to translate your website and its metadata? The TextMaster team is here to help.
