What is multilingual SEO, and how does it help your business?

SEO is a very broad practice that covers many branches, one of which is multilingual SEO.

Many times it happens that we have a website which can be in more than one language (for example, tourism blogs or some service on the internet).

The vast majority of people, when they have a site with these characteristics, usually turn to an automatic translator.

After all, manually translating an entire website can be time-consuming or costly.

However, when performing a machine translation, especially if it is a language that we do not know, SEO may not work in this language.

Obviously this is a problem that we must solve, since it makes it less likely that people who speak that language will find the site. The solution: multilingual SEO.

What really is multilingual SEO?

Multilingual SEO is a variant of SEO which offers optimized content in different languages. For many websites, this is a really necessary thing.

For example, if you have a website for tourist sites in Spain, it is probably in Spanish, after all, it is your native language. But what happens if an American tourist looks for destinations in Spain? It is likely that either they will not find your site or they simply do not understand anything.

To solve this, it is necessary that you have an English version of the site or the language in which your visitors come. Of course, it is impossible for you to translate your website into all existing languages, this is where multilingual SEO comes in.

Many people do machine translations and while this is not a completely bad thing, it is not entirely a good thing either. However, the results that you are going to obtain will be much lower.

That is why multilingual SEO represents an option that will allow that content you create to appear to be made by native speakers. In other words, that American tourist who is looking for information about tourist sites, feels that this content has been created by native speakers.

The structure of the URL is a very important factor to consider

Multilingual SEO goes far beyond a simple translation, a very important factor that you must take into account is the structure of the URLs. Each of the versions of your website must be completely independent of from each other. The objective of this is that each of the versions is clearly defined.

In this case, you have two main options to be able to do this geotargeting.

You can use subdomains or subdirectories, for example, in the case of a subdomain, your website would be as follows: en.turismoenespaña.com. And, with the option of sub-directories, your site would be as follows: turismoenespaña.com / en.

Those are the simple and inexpensive ways to do it, both are endorsed by Google.

However, there is a third in which you will have to invest more. In that case, you will need to purchase regional TLDs in each of the countries. For example, for Spain: misitioweb.es, while for the United States, misitioweb.us.