When can website translation improve google search ranking?
A great website that gets results for business provides readily understandable and well-organized information that is relevant and important to your target audience. Equally important is that it employs Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics to help that target audience find your website.
If your website is fully optimized but your Google rankings and traffic aren’t improving, then what could you be missing?
Part of the issue is that your competition is probably doing the same SEO as you are. They may have good writers and SEO experts producing quality content, but what they most likely are not doing, is translating their site into a language other than English. This oversight is how translating your website can improve traffic and Google ranking. It simultaneously enables your website to tap into markets that competitors are ignoring.
How Google Accounts for Translated Content
Even though a translation is technically duplicating content into another language; Google does not consider translation as a duplicate because the intention is to target a different audience, as opposed to replicating content to get a higher search ranking. This is important because Google reduces search rank if its algorithms detect replication on your site or a third-party location connected to your site.
What does matter is how your content is translated. If you use a translation tool, essentially all that happens is that each word is substituted for the closest foreign language equivalent. Google considers such duplication from any translation tool, including its own Google Translate, as “auto-generated” to manipulate search rankings.
Even if Google didn’t penalize the simplistic results of a translation tool, you don’t want to use one. A translation tool doesn’t understand context; the result is a translation that often doesn’t make sense because of grammatical and syntactic errors. Your Google ranking may improve but conversions won’t because native speakers can’t make sense of your content and will quickly move on.
Instead, make sure you use a professional translation service. This not only eliminates the possibility that Google might consider it as duplicate content; perhaps, more importantly, it ensures fluent content that engages your foreign target audience.
International SEO Considerations
A professional translation service can also help you deal with SEO and basic website construction issues. Google could still penalize your ranking even if you’ve done an effective translation that isn’t word-to-word content if you don’t “tell” Google your translation is an alternate version. This is easily avoidable by properly tagging your pages and indexing them so Google recognizes they are translated versions, not duplicates.
Another important SEO consideration is that keywords in English are not the same as keywords in another language. Again, one-to-one word substitution is not the same as the translated meaning. A professional translation service can provide the best keywords for the native language.
Note: You may have heard that keywords are no longer important in SEO. It’s true, Google’s metrics and the way it tracks keywords have changed and are expected to continue to evolve. But it is not true that keywords are no longer of value. SEO experts, such as Search Engine Journal, report that keywords still matter to Google and remain important SEO tools.
Case Study: Neilpatel.com
Neil Patel is an SEO expert and industry consultant. He explains how he increased traffic to his own site thanks to properly translated content. In 2015, he published his first article in Portuguese. In one month, he went from some 100,493 unique visitors to 144,196. By mid-2018, he added posts in German and Spanish. In June 2018, he had 173,772 unique hits in Portuguese, 45,772 in German and 79,388 in Spanish, all on top of normal traffic in English.
Targeting customers in foreign countries by using their native language gives you a leg up on the competition who are solely using English to sell their services. By targeting foreign markets using native language articles and advertisements, not only do your overall Google rankings and traffic results improve, but also your revenue potential. Neil Patel generated over a million dollars in revenue in a year in Brazil, where Portuguese is the native language and only 3 percent speak English.
Contact BURG Translations to discuss your website translation needs to improve your Google ranking and traffic results. We speak the languages you need to grow your business.
