Just a few years ago, hardly anyone knew what SEO was all about, or even what the letters stood for. Times have changed however, and these days Search Engine Optimization is quickly eating up a huge percentage of businesses’ advertising budgets as companies large and small realize just how far they can spread online.
The internet has led to amazing opportunities for savvy businesses and entrepreneurs to expand their reach and target new audiences, even on a relatively small budget. But while many of these companies can succeed at home, they’re quickly learning that the penetration of foreign markets is not so easy.
There’s a reason for this – it’s one thing to hire a translation agency and ensure that your company’s website is localized for the target market, but that’s only half the story. Just because you’ve mastered the art of SEO at home, it doesn’t mean that your site will rank anywhere close to page one in search engines in other countries.
Humans are not the target
SEO Translation is vital to ensuring your company website pops up on the first page of search engines in whatever market you are targeting, but this cannot be entrusted to any old translation agency. Many make the mistake of thinking that translating your site’s content and keywords will be enough to ensure it gets ranked, but SEO doesn’t work like that.
What many forget is that with SEO translation, the target is not human readers but machines, or more precisely, search engines.
Search engines do a whole lot more than just read the text and keywords on your site – there are many other attributes which need to be translated to ensure a page can dominate the local target market. The text in its entirety must be translated, including keywords and expressions, as well as aspects like title tags, meta tags, script messages and anchor texts, to ensure that the page is as attractive for search engines in the target language as it’s possible to be.
Proper SEO translation by a professional translation agency is the only way to ensure that your website will rank in the target country when someone searches for one of your products or services in a foreign language – regardless of how well your site ranks at home. For those companies whose sites already rank well in their native language, professionally done SEO translations will all but guarantee a high ranking in their target markets, opening the door to more markets, more site visitors, and more sales.
