Sourcing Focus
May 27th, 2008
http://www.sourcingfocus.com/documents/Outsourcing_Multilingual_SEO.doc
Outsourcing Multilingual SEO
The principle of multilingual
Imagine an airline that flies exclusively between England and the US. Sure, it gets lots of business from English and American tourists, but this airline is clearly missing out on big travel markets around the world. The airline could see massive gains by expanding its destination list by even a few countries.
The same principle lies behind websites. English-only websites will attract English traffic. Yet 70 percent of the online community does not speak English.
Multilingual SEO allows companies to reach markets to which they would otherwise be invisible.
Greig Holbrook, director of www.obanmultilingual.com, stresses that businesses which are not optimising their sites for international markets are missing out on a huge chunk of their target audience.
What is multilingual SEO?
Multilingual SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to international websites from search engines. To understand the process, we must first understand how search engines work.
Search engines like Google send out “spiders” which “crawl” through the web. The spider reads a webpage, and follows its links to other sites.
The spider records its findings in a giant index. The information in the index is then sifted through and ranked in order of relevance.
How search engines determine these rankings is most important for multilingual SEO. Search engines look for a number of things when ranking, such as location and frequency of keywords on the page, and links to that page.
Why outsource multilingual SEO?
The internet is growing because it is making our lives easier. However, it is making the lives of marketers everywhere much more complicated.
It is difficult enough for marketers to keep up-to-date with current English trends, let alone trends in other languages. Trying to do business in other cultures takes marketing to a whole new level.
It is becoming increasingly essential that companies hire external help to keep up with the rapidly changing market.
That’s where multilingual SEO companies come in. These companies will have the resources available to make your site optimal for international search engines.
“Oban’s employees,” says Greig, “are ideally placed all over the world to gain a firm grasp of the localisms in their respective countries, and to use that information to identify the keywords that are applicable to particular businesses.”
The multilingual SEO company is then able to use that knowledge to target each market differently.
Websites that go multilingual often see more than a 100 percent increase in traffic. Businesses are beginning to realise the benefits of doing business on a global scale.
“The amount of demand for what we do has grown exponentially,” says Greig.
Case Study:
Premier Aviation, a UK company offering specialist flights for business travel, wanted to tap into the growing demand from Chinese business travellers. The company decided to outsource their multilingual SEO to OBAN Multilingual. They focused on paid search and SEO (search engine optimisation) for both local Chinese search engines and Google China.
Within a week, the company began receiving enquiries from major Chinese companies, all at a fraction of the cost of traditional mediums. The search terms used were often combinations of both English and Chinese. Because of this, there were many varieties of phrases, whereas in English there was only one. The majority of the traffic came through Baidu. Premier Aviation’s site traffic continues to grow at a rate of 40-50 percent per month.
What to look for in a multilingual SEO company
Ideally, the multilingual SEO company will have offices around the world, allowing researchers to localize a website’s content to the particular culture they want to target.
English sites should not be simply translated into the native language of a particular country. What businesses need to look at is key phrases customised to each individual region.
Keywords typed into search engines may be written according to regional spellings, which vary vastly - they may be misspelled, or they could be words we might never have associated with the topic.
The multilingual SEO company should be targeting a variety of search engines. The majority of multilingual search is conducted using search engines other than Google. It is crucial that they have a local understanding of the search engines in each country and of how best to optimise for those countries.
In China, for example, the most popular search engine is Baidu. Leading the pack in Russia is Yandex, a local search engine.
There should be a focus on link building as well. Recent changes to algorithms on the major search engines have made the destination of the links back to websites a critical factor for multilingual SEO.
Finally, make sure that the company you choose writes the content for each language from scratch. The copy should include phrases common to the local language, and the design of the website should be appealing to local tastes.
