How to Harness the Power of Multi-Language SEO With Localization by Adriana Stein of AS Marketing

Adriana Stein, CEO and founder of AS Marketing, shared how to leverage multi-language SEO to drive traffic to your site.

Adriana covered:

• Best practices for localizing the site structure and SEO strategy.

• How to avoid common pitfalls with mass-website translations.

• Best practices and tools for conducting keyword research and keyword localization for international SEO.

• International SEO forecasting and ROI (with examples).

Listen to the webinar as audio only on your favorite podcast platform:

• Apple Podcast

• Spotify

About Adriana Stein:
Adriana is the CEO & Founder of AS Marketing. Adriana helps businesses develop sustainable business growth with holistic digital marketing strategies using an SEO-driven approach. She’s a contributor to popular websites including Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land.

Follow Adriana on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriana-stein-631a13145/

Adriana: So today, today I'm gonna be talking about multi-language SEO, with localization which is something that I specialize in and my agency is really built around. So I can just give you a little bit of a. Context about myself and my expertise. So yeah, as Travis stated, I'm originally from us and have been based in Hamburg, Germany, for over seven years.

And that's basically where the concept of the agency developed. I started helping companies predominantly from the US and the UK expand into Germany because of the language knowledge and the market knowledge. And now my team basically can support that in over 30 languages as well and counting.

So we regularly work on projects that involve maybe 10 different markets in the EU, for example. Even something very niche. We had a recent project with the Canary Islands. So we're here to help with this very kind of niche localization. And there's a lot of advantage to that as well, even if you already have.

Kind of a big, globally known brand. I'm gonna cover that in a little bit. But there's so much opportunity with localization, and so this is kind of where companies come to us and where we can support you with that sort of expansion. Although we'll talk about s e o in particular today, we can support you in basically every marketing channel.

So we do a lot of Pp C projects as well. Brand strategy email marketing. So anything that you'd like to do in other languages, then we're here to help. We're super conversion-focused, which is also going to be a big part of this presentation today because ss e o should be just as conversion is driven as P P C for it to really work.

But I'll come back to that later. And if you'd like to chat with me later on, feel free to write to me on LinkedIn or Twitter, or X, however that's called. I'm still confused about that; what's going on there? Or send me an email; my email's just directly here on this slide. So without further ado, here's what we'll cover today.

So we'll start with best, best practices for localizing the site structure and the ss e o strategy in general. So it's very important to note that. It's not just a mass translation; there's a whole lot more nuance that goes into localization versus translation, which is also something I'll cover.

Best practices and tools for connecting keyword research and keyword localization, which is. I would argue the most important part of setting up that strategy. And then also international ss e o forecasting and r o i with some examples that my team and I have created for actually real companies.

So you can see how this type of thing is applied. Okay. So just to kind of set the stage about why there is so much opportunity here. Basically, international marketing is becoming the new normal. And the main reason is that revenue diversity increases company sustainability. So basically, what this means is when you aren't reliant on one market, like just the US or just the UK or just, you know, whatever country you're from here today if you work with.

Multiple markets and you have multiple audiences that can really help you when maybe one market is struggling but then another market is doing better. And I can really say, even from my personal experience from my agency, how. Big deal that has been for us over the last two years and, and, you know, dealing with covid and dealing with the global recession right now and things like that, there's always been some shifts in whether we have more clients in Germany for a while, or more clients from the UK for a while, more clients from the US for a while.

And so this is the approach that we help you with as well. And there's so much opportunity within that because, You can always, you know, kind of pick and choose, all right, which market is doing better, so let's put more effort into that. And then that can keep the company revenue stable while there are changes and fluctuations.

And it's also really today what customers expect because. There's so much competition in basically every industry, and really, the way to stand out from your competitors and match this level or really even exceed this level of personalization that a lot of customers expect, then that's where localization is one of the best ways you can really do that.

So speak to your target audience in a very specific way that resonates with them, ideally in the language they prefer, and just try to make it. As engaging and personal as possible. And so all of this together really is why international marketing is basically one of the biggest things that investors are looking to use as an expansion tactic and scaling tactic for the company nowadays.

But it's not just a matter of translating your website. So there's a whole lot more to expanding internationally. Then just your website. It requires really an operational shift to really fully generate r o I. 'cause you have to think about how I can communicate with my audience across customer service, across sales, and things like that.

And so you have to, you know, you have to kind of think beyond just doing a big mass website translation. Because if you, if you just do that portion and then you leave it there, then. It can be really difficult to really expand with that unless you have a very established customer base from that market already.

But a lot of companies don't. They're, a lot of them aren't in that stage. They're, they're more looking at the beginning. So when you're looking at holistic marketing localization or even business localization, you have to think about, okay, what are they. What do we need to change in terms of our brand?

What makes our product unique? Because there are probably different competitors in that new market. So we have to find a new way to describe our uniqueness. You have to find a way to describe your, your brand messaging and your brand tone of voice that resonates with that particular market.

So what are their pain points, their buying process, and their customer journey? What are the problems that they have? I can say for sure. Specializing in the German market, the customer journey in Germany versus the US is so different. It's so completely different. It's like night and day, especially in B two B.

And people just take a long time to trust companies, especially companies that are non-German. And in Germany, for example, you would rather. Just stick to what you know, even if it's more expensive, maybe, but it's simply because you know it and you trust it. And so these are the kinds of things you always have to consider if you're coming in from.

Outside of the market, you know, how can I really do a good job of understanding my target audience there and what do I need to say to them? And then that is what goes into the strategy that you're gonna create for marketing and then for ss e o in particular. So that's where your website comes into play.

And then also the operations piece, it's really important as well, so, Just to give another example from Germany, because that's the market I know the best off the top of my head. For example, the payment process should include an invoice option. Because Germans don't pay with credit cards, they typically don't even have a credit card.

So if you only offer a credit card payment, you're really gonna struggle to get customers there, and they're going to want to choose an invoice option instead. So these are kind of all of the elements you really need to think about. Before s e o and then after ss e o to really ensure that the company is actually making money from that effort.

Because localization is a lot of effort, but it has a lot of returns, too, when it's done properly, and you really put the customer's needs at the forefront. So there's sometimes some confusion also between translation and localization because these are two different concepts. So I mentioned that. When you do a mass website translation, basically, this means that you're using Google Translate or some other tool.

I've heard of someone doing this with programmatic s e o and it, and it could kind of start them off on their website, but they're also paid tools for that. And that's just basically where you take, you know, a kind of AI translation, and then it just updates everything automatically. So there's no.

Human check of everything. It's really just directly what that software is using. And then there's localization, which is a whole lot of steps that you have to really do in addition, as a part of optimizing the ss e o strategy for that local market. And this is very important because if you don't do this step, then a lot of the time.

An effort that you put in for translation isn't really going to yield anything. So localization is a whole lot more involved. You have to identify keywords that are relevant to the local audience. Sometimes if you do a direct translation of one keyword from English to another language, it just doesn't work at all.

I think I have a couple of examples in here a little bit later. So you have to really look at mine. Target audience within this market? How do they phrase the specific thing? How do they talk about my product or service or topics related to my product or service? What are they searching for in general in the local language?

Does it have the same kind of search intent? Another example from German is that a lot of the transactional intent keywords in English are informational intent keywords in German. So you actually need a whole different type of content too. Actually, rank for that keyword. So if you directly just translated your content in that kind of context, you're probably not gonna rank for it like that.

And then, of course, just make sure that you go through and do all of the localization across the rest of the content as well. And just generally for ss e o, you know, headings, your metadata, things like that are all optimized for the content itself, local messaging, and then the correct ss e o settings for the multilingual site, which is one of.

The most important one to share is that it has an impact. So yeah, as I mentioned before, it sounds like a lot of, a lot of extra steps, but when you directly translate keywords or content, and you do just like a direct mass translation, this often has little to no on sss e o performance. And I can directly say this from a data perspective because.

The majority of the time, we start with our clients. They have done a mass website translation, and they have seen nothing from it, and they're wondering why. And so then when we can go and, and look in and see, okay, well, this has probably just been a mass translation. So if you don't have the local localization part of things, then you've kind of just done this one piece that isn't really going to get you very far.

It's sort of like if you think about exercising; you just exercise for eight hours one day, and now you're like thinking you're super fit. But that's not how it works. You have to do, you know, make it like a habit, and you have to do all of these little things to kind of build up your health and your exercise capability.

While it's the same in multi-language and international SEOs, you have to really make kind of a full-on effort for it to work. So in terms of how that starts, then I'm just gonna walk you through the steps. The first and most important thing is prepping the site structure. Because of the site structure, if this is not set up properly, you're going to have tons of technical problems down the road.

You're gonna have trouble tracking down the road, and that's always a major thing that you need to have because if you can't show what you're. The effort has been brought in with s e o; then it's very hard for stakeholders to continue to invest in it or see why it was worth it. So before you do anything, actually, even, even if you want to do a mass translation or you have done it, just make sure you at least start with this portion because if it's set up improperly, it will be so hard to fix later on.

We had one client actually that had, before they worked with us, they had set up. A completely new domain in, in a new subdomain in Spanish, but it hadn't localized any of the URLs or any piece of metadata or anything like that. It was just purely the content itself. And then a lot of that had to be redone because it wasn't set up properly where the Spanish site was on its own.

Space. So each language needs to have its own space, and that's where the site structure portion is so important. So there are a couple of options where you can give each language its own space. So, for example, you'll have the subfolder approach exempt example.com/whatever language you have. Option two can be a subdomain.

So that language does, in this case example com. Or a third option is to create an entirely new domain. So instead of a.com, then you have Dee for Germany. For example, I've seen cases of all of them, and a lot of it really depends on your tech stack. That's gonna be the major. Influencer about which one is possible for you to use.

So if you can, I suggest you really stick to option one because it just preserves domain authority. I know that's kind of like a hot topic in the s e O world right now. But we have seen from the data that it's very, very clear that if you just use all of the organic traffic and all of the backlinks that you have on your original site and you can directly push it into the new language area, then that makes a big, big difference in how.

Quickly things start ranking, and you start accumulating traffic within the new language. So, it does make a pretty big impact to have this set up properly. And this is one of the parts that confuse people the most when starting out. So if you have any questions on this one, particularly what you should do within the context of your business, then feel free to write to me, 'cause there are probably some questions on that one.

So once you have things technically set up, Now you can really start building your strategy. So you can start by doing this by looking for your local competitors. There's a really handy tool called ss e o Quake, and it just pulls up this little section on the left-hand side of the SERPs.

So what you see when you Google something and then you can change it to. A specific country in a specific language. And this is important to have both. Because if you think of a country like France, for example, that speaks English and French, then you can see certs for both different languages. So these are all elements of localization you have to consider as well.

You know, like think Switzerland, for example, they speak German, Swiss German. English, Italian, and French, depending on where you're from in the country. So if you're looking to go into Switzerland, you really have to look okay ultra, ultra-local. I've even heard from some colleagues who were working with France as a target market.

They actually even localized Northern France versus Southern France, and they saw a lot of impact from that because it was so personal for their audience. So it's very important to look at both the market and the language and then look at the competitors. From within that market as well, and within that language, because you can have different competitors for different languages, but within the same.

Market. So I hope that makes sense. It might be a little bit confusing, but how can you kind of determine what your main competitors are? Okay. Yeah. You can go into Simr, for example, and, you know, look at its automatic competitor listings for your specific website. But I really don't suggest to trust that entirely.

You might get an idea from that, but when you look at actually the main keywords that you wanna rank for, What you should actually do is just use seo quake and set it up for the language in the market that you want to target. And then you actually just google that keyword, and you see who pops up.

And then if you start to see these repeat websites for the main keywords that you want to rank for, then that's the best way to identify really who you're going to be competing against within. The Organic seats because there is a difference between like a product-for-product competitor and a competitor who has a similar or the same product and is also doing SS e o and also doing ss e o within that market and within that language.

So there can be big differences within those different steps. So that's why I suggest rather a little bit more manual work in terms of identifying competitors. And then, you can start doing keyword research from there. So always focus your keyword research on the long tail. That really goes regardless of the language because it's just that much easier to match search intent when you write content for that.

So try to use a longer form. Keywords within that local language that have search volume. And then, you can start doing a lot more research and building up your content strategy based on this. Here's just kind of an example from RES as well, but you can do the same kind of research, and Uber suggests or has, I think as well, is pretty good for this kind of thing.

I found them all to be pretty equal, so you can kind of take your own pick. You can just start looking at, okay, what are the variations of those keywords? So here I have a marketing automation in German, and then you can look at from this list what is relevant for my particular strategy that also has search volume.

And then, I can put that now into my content strategy because I know that that's something that my audience is searching for. So there's kind of one big piece of it. It's really ensuring the keywords that you choose are not too crazy difficult in the beginning. But they also match search intent.

So, it does match what your audience is looking for. It's not meant to be something else. If you, if you translated it, really go back, and if you, you type it in here, and you can see what pops up, the kind of things that pop up. Even if you just use it like a. Google Translate, translate the SERP so you can see what's, what's showing up in case you don't speak the language.

Then you can kind of tell what the search intent is. And so you just start building a list of all of the keywords that are relevant to your products and services. And then as well as looking at how we can group those into content pillars. So primary topics or primary themes that we as a business want to be known for.

So that may be, if you're a C R M software, for example, you'd probably wanna rank for c r m something, which is like marketing automation here in this. For example, you may also want to rank four topics around G D P R if you're expanding to the EU because data privacy and G D P R in the EU are very, very important, and that might not have been as relevant for a US audience, for example.

So again, you always have to be thinking about what are the primary things that we want to target and bring for what makes sense within that. Particular market. What is their audience searching for, and what information do they need to know or do they want to learn about? And then that's what the ss e o strategy should be built around.

And then all of the keywords localized within that particular language as well. So then, from there, you can really just turn things into a keyword map. So It looks like something like this. Different people have different ways of setting this up. I've also seen it done visually, which is pretty cool.

But basically, the point is you are just outlining which keywords are based on their search intent and the general topic they cover. What should the topic of the content be based on that? Then building some other related keywords that are semantically related or intent related. So semantically, they are another way of saying the same thing or something similar, which is really common in German, actually.

For example, there are like 10 ways to say the same thing. So usually those clusters are very prominent within German, ss, e o, that you have to kind of find all the different variations and then. You just build out the different groups. And so, each of these would be a single content piece. So whether it's a blog article or whether it's a product or a service page, you can do ss e o for those and definitely should if you have the space.

And then you just build this out. So this is basically what becomes the basis of your content strategy. So, you know, when you go into content production, you just look at, okay, Here's the title of the content that I need, here's the keywords that I need, and then just do some additional research on what is appearing in particular for those keywords.

And you can base your content on that. And this is really the best way to do localization. So maybe you would take some English content or an English keyword and look at it, okay? How would I say this in that local language and then do your keyword research around what you may know the phrase to be and find the exact one that people are searching for?

And so that's kind of the extra step that you have to take with localization, as opposed to English. But it's really worth it because then you know you have search volume. And this is, again, going back to why the mass translation doesn't often have an impact. On s e o expansions or, or using ss e o to promote an, an international expansion because if you just directly translate keywords and you don't identify those ones that match search intent and have surge volume, then it, it doesn't do anything for your strategy.

It has no impact that way otherwise. Okay. So yeah, I mentioned the great importance of keywords. Localization. So I just wanted to give you a couple of examples of how big a difference this can actually make. And so, in this first example, we have a company that was based in us. They have a.

Popular heated tobacco products, and they wanted to expand into Hungary. This project actually, they wanted to expand across all of Eastern Europe, but this example in particular is from Hungary with an s e o driven approach. And if you look at the US, for example, there's, for the term heated tobacco, there's 390 search volume.

But if you take the direct word-for-word translation, what would have been provided from a translation tool? I'm not gonna. Attempt to pronounce that in Hungarian. But for the direct translation of heated tobacco, there was no search volume. But if you look at how people in Hungary actually phrase it.

Heated tobacco, which is quite different, then you actually have even more search volume than in the us. And so this shows how familiar the Hungarian market is already with heated tobacco, which is actually more than in us, at least from a search perspective. So this is the kind of thing that you identify when you're doing localization, and if you stop it, just a translation.

You would miss out on a chance to rank for something that has an 880 search volume. That's probably also quite easy to rank for in a market like Hungary. And then I also mentioned that sometimes there are different ways of saying different things, especially in different languages. So here's an example of that as well, where we have a company that they wanted to localize.

Their content is from English to German, and they're looking at a blog about process management, so how can we localize the keywords for that? So we see in the US market, there's 390 search volume for what is process management in English. And then, if you look at the direct translation plus process management.

There are only 20 search volumes within Germany. But if you say it in a different way, Like process management definition in German, it's a much more searched-for term than you have for 180 search volumes in Germany. So these are the little nuances that you will uncover through localization that have a huge, huge impact on the performance of your strategy.

So if, if you can imagine, you know, going from zero with, with hunger here to 880 or. 20 to 480, and let's say you have a specific conversion rate, organic traffic, and conversion rate on your website. You're, you're gonna get a much bigger percentage of conversions because you, you just simply have more search volume.

More people are going to click on your website, et cetera. So this is the stuff that you wanna try to identify and, and pinpoint really within that strategy. 'cause that's what brings in all of them, the strength and scalability from it later on. And then once you have your keywords identified and how you wanna use them, then you can put them into content.

This is pretty similar as it would be in any language in English. You have your title with your focus keyword and your ss e o description with your focus keyword. The big difference between multilingual and international s e o, as I mentioned, is, is the site structure setup. So that's where your U R L slug is very important that you should have.

Your language subfolder or if you've done a subdomain, you can do it like that too. And then your long tail focus keyword in that local language. And that's very important because Google can help you understand the language of the content much better when you have that U R l within that local language.

'cause Google crawls things through links, so it's reading things through those links, and that's how it knows. Which type of language applies here? So a common question I get that relates to that is, can I put multiple languages on the same page? Well, this is the reason why I would not suggest doing that.

Try to have a home for each language on your website and separate them out. Because not only is that better for your reader, but for your audience that everything is organized into one place. But you'll also definitely use Google's crawling capability if you put. Different languages are mixed together, especially within that U R L slug.

Okay. And a very important piece of ss e o once all of that content is optimized and live is to make sure you're tracking everything. It's; it's super, super important, and I originally come from the world of SS e o, and I've learned more so from my team with P P C, how well conversion tracking has been long done.

With ss e o, we've seemed to kind of come at it from a different approach. But I actually think that we should take data and conversion tracking for s e o just as seriously. As in P P C, because that's the way that we can understand what's working, what's not, how do we optimize things? Especially important is which market is performing better than the other.

In terms of international s e o, you know, maybe in France you're doing really well, but in Canada you're struggling for some reason. And so that's why we're tracking and, and having that specific language section on the website will help organize all of that. So, of course, start with your keyword tracking.

This, in particular, is from what Uber suggests, but a lot of ss e o tools have that set up. And then just make sure that you have different keyword trackings for each market and each language so that you're not just looking at the main route domain. Because if you only look at main root domain growth, then you're going to have trouble distinguishing the different market performances.

So you'll wanna separate those out. Then, of course, also make sure that you have per-market conversion tracking and different tracking types. So this might look a little bit different in GA four now, but it's a similar concept that you have. A kind of event on each page. So if you're e-commerce, then probably you're gonna look even at direct sales.

But it also could be, I don't know, joining an event, like a webinar like you're here today. Or it could be if you're in B two B contacting sales or filling in a form or something like this. So all of that should be tracked and have separate tracking. For each market and for the pages that are a part of the s e o strategy as well, so you can understand where all of those conversions are coming from.

And then just make sure to have them labeled depending on which type of conversion they are. So, you know, if you have something that's purchase focused versus just like engagement focused, you can look at those differences there. And then important for B two B as well is looking at what's also happening once someone becomes a lead and what's happening with the sales process.

Because that's the best way to understand how ss e o could have influenced something. From way long before that's now been closed. And that just helps ensure that SS e o has visibility within the company as a growth channel because it absolutely can. And the best way to do that is really just to have this full idea of the data and conversion tracking all the way from keyword rankings to your monthly organic traffic changes to your conversions, and then to.

Purchases or close deals. And so you can keep track of that and tables like this. You may have a C R M or some sort of software that compiles that as well. But just make sure that that data is not just from P P C or email marketing, but it's also for SS e o because Ss e o deserves to be in there very much as a very big growth driver.

Growth driver. So, You can look at things here, too, like potential revenue from leads. For example, if this amount of leads came in and we know a certain, we have a certain lead to close percentage, then here's the potential revenue we could have from those kinds of leads. So these are all the things that should really be tracked , on a regular basis, for s e o regardless of whether it's used for multi-language.

But in general, for all of that, Okay. And then lastly, here I have just a couple of examples in terms of forecasting, and this; how you would do this depends a little bit on the business and the context that you have. But there are a couple of ways of doing this. One I really suggest is to use s e o monitor.

I'm not affiliated with them or anything, but I think their product is really cool. So if you're, if you're really trying to do data-driven ss, e o SS e o monitors are really, really perfect for setting up that forecasting. But you do need to have your keywords. Picked out first. So, you can, you can upload a keyword list.

So go through all of those steps that I showed in previous slides and get your keyword list together from your keyword map. Then you can upload it into ss e o monitor, and you can start to build your forecast. So you can set a certain timeframe. You can set how aggressive you want to be.

You can set How you want your visibility to increase in comparison with a competitor. So here again, you wanna find a local competitor that you're comparing your visibility to. Not a mass-market brand but a primary one, that is, that is, locally ranked within that market. Then you're gonna get a much brighter idea of how you're going to compete and improve visibility within that particular market.

You'll get an idea of what it is. Click-through rate based on the keywords that you've chosen and how much traffic that is going to bring in. And then you can set a goal to increase your visibility within six months, 12 months, whatever the case may be that you're looking at within ss e o.

And then the second part of this forecast looks something like this. So you can see, for example, previously the. Keyword search volume for 27 category pages. This is an e-commerce product that has a lot of search volume. It could generate 312 additional traffic across a year. This considers seasonality and then the number of conversions, and the conversions come from an estimation of 5%.

Conversion rate, which is pretty for this type of e-commerce product. This is pretty typical. But it's always really important to know that this is just a forecast. And oftentimes, especially if you're looking at, at this amount of traffic and this amount of search volume, oftentimes you have to do a lot more than just optimizing a few pages or localizing a few pages.

You'll really want to build up topical authority. So build up your internal linking strategy through the rest of your website. Use your content together to be like an authority engine and build authority to those main pages that you wanna rank for. And look out for what you need to optimize over time.

Naturally, build backlinks don't buy them, but naturally build backlinks. There are a lot of ways you can do that. That's another topic that I could also talk about for another 40 minutes, but I won't worry you about that here today. But links, links definitely still matter. And then, just to give an example of a forecast from B two B, this one in particular is for the German market.

So another way you can do it is say, okay. We think based on how the local competitors are performing, how much search volume there is in general for our particular product and our, or our service, I guess in this case. And let's say we will set a milestone to increase organic traffic by 30% in the next six months, which is actually very realistic for the majority.

Businesses. If you're, if you're really doing holistic ss e o and then doing it properly, that's, that's achievable for, for most everyone. And then look at, based on that, what is your conversion rate from this organic traffic? So let's say 2%. 'cause in B two B, it's typically a little bit lower because then for e-commerce, Then from that then we will get around 270 free trials or demos, depending on what your product is.

And let's say you have an average contract value of 65,000. You know, your lead-to-close rate is 5%. So from this effort, you're gonna get it. 13 sales that are worth 65,000 which is 845,000 per month in gross revenue. But this is not considering operational costs or things like the sales cycle. So this is kind of just a start.

You'll have to really put together something more in detail based on your specific business to really understand. What the actual figures would be. But this can at least give you kind of a starting point. This is something that my team and I do for all of our clients as well who really want to expand.

So, if this is something you're interested in seeing for your business, please feel free to send me an email or contact me. Book a call through the website or something like that. We do this as a part of ours. Our own sales process in the beginning, so you can understand if you wanna make a certain investment.

So it's, there's, there's no cost to it, but at least you can get an idea of what is possible with s e o or sometimes not. Sometimes it's, there's just nothing there. And then it's best to avoid it, and we'll be honest about that too. But in these examples s e o is definitely very much worth it for these two businesses.

And just to give you an example here for a variation from. The Japanese market. So you can see the difference between Germany and Japan for this particular company. The money that they would make because the search volume was less for Japan, which is normal, was about half, so important always, again, to look at each particular market and not just the whole, like, you know, lots of markets and lump them together, but look at the potential of, of each individual market.

I think that's it for me. So I think there might be some questions, so I can start going through those. Awesome. Yeah.

Travis: Great job. We do have a couple of questions. Thank you. To kind of kick it off, I think the first one would be, I. From anonymous, our company has decided to go the route of only using an on-page language switcher to mass translate the site.

Does this option contribute any benefits SS e o? And can we rank in other markets without creating separate sub-folders and sub-domains?

Adriana: Yes. So, What I have seen in my experience is unless you are a very, very established brand with a lot of organic traffic, already a big presence globally, most mass translation efforts don't make any impact.

So I've seen it with enterprise brands where it works because they have like a million inorganic traffic already. Then it's possible 'cause they've already got readers from, from those markets, those international markets already. But, for most businesses, a mass translation is not really going to make an impact without you doing the localization piece because you just simply don't have the authority and you don't have the market.

Presence to rank for anything without really optimizing it well. So that's why I strongly recommend that you have each language have a separate home. So you know your German language part on one part of the website, your French part on another part of the website, and not mix them. What I have found to be not worth it, though, for example, is.

Three separate websites for the DA region, the German-speaking region, so Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. I haven't seen it being worth it where you localize each three of those. But you can, I do, I do suggest at least that you have, you know, one space for one language and then really try to work on localizing that there.

And you're gonna have a much better impact not just from, from. SS e o KPIs, but really from your customers as well, because customers can tell when something is, is just directly translated. And there's always gonna be some things that are strange. And that's why having a human really go through and optimize everything is gonna be a better approach in terms of if you want your readers to turn it into customers.

Travis: Yeah, that makes sense. And the next question is, how do you identify local phrases too? For Google Translate terms, I'm really sure I am following this question.

Adriana: Yeah, I, I think I understand. Okay. What, what they're asking. Yeah. So the best way, the most efficient way, is to work with someone who speaks that language fluently so that they can understand how to translate a certain word or phrase into theirs.

Native language. If you're trying to do that and you don't have that kind of person or language resource, you can start with Google Translate and say, okay, this is my keyword in English, and then put it into Google Translate. But then what you'll want to do is, when you do keyword research, Look at what actually has search volume because, as you'll see in the examples that I showed earlier in the presentation, there can be massive differences.

So you'll want to try to identify those by directly going through and doing your own manual research and not just leaving it at a direct translation because that doesn't work a lot. Awesome.

Travis: Yeah, it's helpful. Then how do you link organic keywords with conversions and close deals as GA four doesn't give you performance

Adriana: by keyword?

Yeah, so that's a good question. You would then have to set up specific event tracking across different pages. So say, for example, you have a group of content that's all about. No, say your law firm, and you're doing content all about G D P R in the EU. Then you would want to take all of that content, and that has ideally the same c t A on it.

And then within that C t A, you would have an event in GA four that's linked to that C T A or that, that kind of event. So probably it's a form I would imagine if you're in B two B and then. That will all show from that specific group of content because you've linked it to that particular form.

How would you do that for every business? It really depends. A lot of things depend on your tech stack. But if you can do something like that, and from what I know just basically about your question, then that's where I would suggest starting. Cool. Helpful.

Travis: And this might be the last question, but how do you navigate meta title and description character limits with words that are very long in different languages?

Adriana: Oh yeah, we just had a recent project where that was very, very difficult in the Nordic languages, especially Finnish. So, I feel your pain there that sometimes it's just very difficult to get in the character limit, but at the end of the day, always prioritize your reader. So don't try to do things you know, like shorten them strangely.

Just because. Google has a character limit, just try to, to, you know, use that language grammatically correct. And then if it gets truncated or, or cut off a little bit on SERPs, that's okay. Because at least when the person goes to the page, they're gonna see, okay, the full thing is written out, and there's not some strange grammar or some weird slang going on, or weird abbreviations, I don't understand.

So just prioritize your reader, then. You know, make your best judgment there.