The web—and search engines in particular—make it easier than ever for businesses of any size to reach an international audience.
A multilingual website makes sense, especially when the majority of websites are in English. After all, you want to stand out to customers by speaking their local language. But it’s no good having a multilingual site if people can’t find it.
That’s where multilingual SEO comes in.
In this article, we’ll show you how to build a multilingual website that ranks in Google and other local search engines. You’ll learn why multilingual SEO is about more than translating your content and specific tasks you need to tick off to make your multilingual site as visible as possible.
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What is multilingual SEO?
Multilingual SEO is the process of optimising your website to improve search visibility in more than one language. It involves creating high-quality translations (including SEO metadata), targeting language-specific keywords and building links in the target language.
The goal is to make your site as discoverable and accessible as possible for users searching Google and other search engines in their local language.
It’s worth pointing out that multilingual SEO differs slightly from international SEO, even if the terms are used interchangeably. With multilingual SEO, you are optimising for a language (so Spanish targets every Spanish-speaking country, not just Spain). In international SEO, you target specific countries, so you might have a different strategy for targeting Argentinian customers vs. Mexican customers.
Why adopt a multilingual SEO strategy?
There are two major reasons to adopt a multilingual SEO strategy: to reach more customers and to deliver the best experience possible.
Reach a wider audience
Not everyone searches the web in English. Even if non-native speakers eventually resort to English, many will try Googling in their own language first. That means if you target customers in multiple non-English-speaking countries, then creating a multilingual SEO is a must to reach as many of them as possible.
A multilingual SEO strategy also boosts your website’s chances of appearing in country-specific search engines like Baidu and Yandex — and in localised versions of Google like Google.fr and Google.de.
Deliver a better user experience
Multilingual SEO gives your customers what they want: the ability to search, browse and shop in their native language. This is a big deal, with 89% of consumers saying it’s important to deal with a brand in their own language.
Improving the user experience also increases the likelihood of non-English-speaking customers converting. As many as 82% of people won’t make a purchase in major consumer categories without local language support.
How to prepare for multilingual SEO success
Before you start creating multilingual SEO content, you need to take care of a couple of things.
Identify target markets
The first step is to identify the languages you want to target. You know your customers better than anyone, so it’s likely you have one or two languages in mind already.
But if you don’t, why not analyse your existing website traffic to discover which languages to target first? The Locations report in Matomo (found in the Visitors section of Matomo’s navigation) shows you which countries your visitors hail from.
In the example above, targeting German and Indonesian searchers would be a sensible strategy.
Target local keywords
Once you’ve decided on your target markets, it’s time to find localised keywords. Keywords are the backbone of any SEO campaign, so take your time to find ones that are specific to your local markets.
Yes, that means you shouldn’t just translate your English keywords into French or Spanish! French or Spanish searchers may use completely different terms to find your products or services.
That’s why it’s vital to use a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to do multilingual keyword research.
This may be a bit tricky if you aren’t a native speaker of your target language, but you can translate your English keywords using Google Translate to get started.
Remember, search volumes won’t be as high as English keywords since fewer people are searching for them. So don’t be scared off by small keyword volumes. Besides, even in the U.S. around 95% of keywords get 10 searches per month or fewer.
Choose your URL structure
The final step in preparing your multilingual SEO strategy is deciding on your URL structure, whether that’s using separate domains, subdomains or subfolders.
This is important for SEO as it will avoid duplicate content issues. Using language indicators within these URLs will also help both users and search engines differentiate versions of your site.
The first option is to have a separate domain for each target language.
- yoursite.com
- yoursite.fr
- yoursite.es
Using subdomains would mean you keep one domain but have completely separate sites:
- fr.yoursite.com
- es.yoursite.com
- de.yoursite.com
Using subfolders keeps everything clean but can result in long URLs:
- yoursite.com/en
- yoursite.com/de
- yoursite.com/es
As you can see in the image below, we use subdomains to separate multilingual versions of you site:
While separate domains provide more precise targeting, it’s a lot of work to manage them. So, unless you have a keyword-rich, unbranded domain name that needs translating, we’d recommend using either subdomains or subdirectories. It’s slightly easier to manage subfolders, but subdomains offer users a clearer divide between different versions of your site.
If you want to make your site even easier to navigate, then you can incorporate language indicators into your page’s design to make it easy for consumers to switch languages. These are the little dropdown menus you see containing various flags that let users browse in different languages.
5 multilingual SEO strategies to use in 2024
Now you’ve got the basics in order, use the following SEO strategies to improve your multilingual rankings.
Use hreflang tags
There’s another way that Google and other search engines use to determine the language and region your website is targeting: hreflang..
Hreflang is an HTML attribute that Google and other search engines use to ensure they serve users the right version of the page.
You can insert it into the header section of the page like this example for a German subdomain:
<link rel=”alternate” href=”https://yourwebsite.com/de” hreflang=”de” />
Or you can add the relevant markup to your website’s sitemap. Here’s what the same German markup would look like:
<xhtml:link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”de” href=”https://yourwebsite.com/de/” />
Whichever method you include one language code in ISO 639-1 format. You can also include a region code in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format. Note that you can include multiple region codes. A web page in German, for example, could target German and Austrian consumers.
Hreflang tags also avoid duplicate content issues.
With a multilingual site, you could have a dozen different versions of the same page, showing the same content but in a different language. Without an hreflang tag specifying that these are different versions of the same page, Google may penalise your site.
Invest in high-quality translations
Google rewards good content. And, while you’d hope Google Translate would be good enough, it usually isn’t.
Instead, make sure you are using professional linguists to translate your content. They won’t only be able to produce accurate and contextually relevant translations — the kind that Google may reward with higher rankings — but they’ll also be able to account for cultural differences between languages.
Imagine you are translating a web page from U.S. English into Italian, for example. You’ve not only got to translate the words themselves but also the measurements (from inches to cm), dates (from mm/dd/yy to dd/mm/yy), currencies, idioms and more.
Translate your metadata, too
You need to translate more than just the content of your website. You should translate its metadata — the descriptive information search engines use to understand your page — to help you rank better in Google and localised search engines.
As you can see in the image below, we’ve translated the French version of our homepage’s title and meta description:
Page titles and meta descriptions aren’t the only pieces of metadata you need to pay attention to. Make sure you translate the following:
- URLs
- Image alt tags
- Canonical tags
- Structured data markup
While you’re at it, make sure you have translated all of your website’s content, too. It’s easy to miss error messages, contact forms and checkout pages that would otherwise ruin the user experience.
Build multilingual backlinks
Building backlinks is an important step in any SEO strategy. But it’s doubly important in multilingual SEO, where your links in your target language also help Google to understand that you have a translated website.
While you want to prioritise links from websites in your target language, make sure that websites are relevant to your niche. It’s no good having a link from a Spanish recipe blog if you have a marketing SaaS tool.
A great place to start is by mining the links of competitors in your target market. Your competitors have already done the hard work acquiring these links, and there’s every chance these websites will link to your translated content, too.
Don’t forget about internal linking pages in the same language, either. This will obviously help users stay in the same language while navigating your site, but it will also show Google the depth of your multilingual content.
Monitor the SEO health of your multilingual site
The technical performance of your multilingual pages has a significant impact on your ability to rank and convert.
We know for a fact that Google uses page performance metrics in the form of Core Web Vitals as a search ranking factor. What’s more, research by WP Rocker finds that a side loading in one second has a three times better conversion rate than a site loading in five seconds.
With that in mind, make sure your site is performing at optimal levels using Matomo’s SEO Web Vitals report. Our SEO Web Vitals feature tracks all of Google’s Core Web Vitals, including:
- Page Speed Score
- First Contentful Paint (FCP)
- Final Input Delay (FID)
- Last Contentful Paint (LCP)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
The report displays each metric in a different colour depending on your site’s performance, with green meaning good, orange meaning average, and red meaning poor.
Check in on these metrics regularly or set up custom alerts to automatically notify you when a specific metric drops below or exceeds a certain threshold — like if your Page Speed score falls below 50, for example.
How to track your multilingual SEO efforts with Matomo
Matomo isn’t just a great tool to track your site’s SEO health; you can also use our privacy-focused analytics platform to track your multilingual SEO success.
For example, you could use the report to focus your multilingual SEO efforts on a single language if searches are starting to rival English. Or you decide to translate your most trafficked English keywords into your target languages, regardless if a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush tells you whether these keywords get searches or not.
If you want to analyse the performance of your new language, for example, you can segment traffic by URL. In our case, we use the segment “Page URL contains fr.matomo.org” to measure the impact of our French website.
We can also track the performance of every language except French by using the segment “Page URL does not contain fr.matomo.org”.
You can use Matomo to track your Keyword performance, too. Unlike search engine-owned platforms like Google Analytics and Google Search Console that no longer share keyword data, Matomo lets users see exactly which keywords users search to find your site in the Combined keywords report:
This is valuable information you can use to identify new keyword opportunities and improve your multilingual content strategy.
For example, you could use the report to focus your multilingual SEO efforts on a single language if searches are starting to rival English. Or you decide to translate your most trafficked English keywords into your target languages, regardless if a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush tells you whether these keywords get searches or not.
For international brands that have separate websites and apps for each target language or region, Matomo’s Roll-Up Reporting lets you keep track of aggregate data in one place.
Roll-Up Reporting lets you view data from multiple websites and apps as if they were a single site. This lets you quickly answer questions like:
- How many visits happened across all of my multilingual websites?
- Which languages contributed the most conversions?
- How does the performance of my Spanish app compare to my Spanish website?
Is it any wonder, then, that Matomo is used by over one million sites in 190 countries to track their web and SEO performance in a privacy-friendly way?
Join them today by trying Matomo free for 21 days, no credit card required. Alternatively, request a demo to see how Matomo can help you track your multilingual SEO efforts.
