How Multilingual SEO Boosts Your Site in the SERPs and Your Bottom Line

There are lots of reasons to consider translating the text on your website. Doing so increases your potential audience, can boost conversions and makes your site more accessible. But these are only the basic benefits, there are more.

Did you know that creating a multilingual site will help boost your SEO efforts? You’ll need some guidance on how to do so the right way, but if everything is implemented correctly translating your site into other languages will improve your website’s standing in the SERPs as well as your reputation with your audience.

In this article, I’m going to explain how you could improve your SEO by making your site multilingual.

The Basic Benefits of a Multilingual Site

If your website is an English only site it is hardly in the minority. More than half of the websites on the Internet are. Which is rather shocking, as half the world does not speak English. Some will point to the fact that English is the most commonly used language among Internet users, but isn’t that really only because other native tongues are poorly catered to?

For example, nearly a billion Internet users speak Chinese as their primary language. Yet only 2% of the sites on the web are offered in Chinese. By the same token, only 5% of websites offer content in Spanish and yet it’s the native tongue of 500 million internet users across Europe, North America, South America and the Caribbean.

Basically it seems that many site owners just focus on the most popular language among users and skip over the vast numbers who don’t otherwise speak English. Even, in many instances, if they know that non native English speakers make up an important sector of their audience.

There are plenty of benefits to stepping outside of this narrow mindset and opting for a multilingual site. For example you can:

Expand Your Audience

Considering the numbers and statistics I just mentioned, this one is rather obvious. There are billions of Internet users out there who don’t speak English as a first language. For many businesses, catering to them opens up a new, untapped audience and possible new sources of revenue.

Engage a More Diverse Group of Users

Many businesses, especially ecommerce and service businesses, already know that some of their target audience are not native English speakers. For example, those operating in very diverse areas of large cities all over the world know that their customer/client/patient base is likely to comprise people who speak several different languages.

If a business then translates their web content into several languages to better serve their audience, they almost instantly gain an advantage over competitors that do not. If users can read your content in their own language, then this is likely to increase trust, leading to increased conversions and greater customer loyalty.

The Multilingual SEO Boost

Going back to the beginning of my article, you’ll remember that I mentioned the fact that making your site multilingual could actually also help it rank better in search engines. Let’s look at why this is.

Translated Versions of Your Site Improve Its Overall SEO Juice

The easiest way to explain this benefit is to offer a hypothetical example.

Let’s say you own a site called example.com. Your company sells clothing to countries across Europe and to consumers in North America (as many ecommerce companies now do.)

To better serve you target audience you translate your site from English into French, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian. Each translated version of the content gets its own unique URL. This can be achieved by either using a separate domain name for each – example.fr perhaps – or, more simply, by making use of use a sub-domain or subdirectory, such as example.com/en/ and example.com/fr/.

Whatever way you choose to implement this -and the latter is much easier – Google and other search engine bots will read both versions as parts of the same site. This means any traffic you get from the various different versions will improve the search engine ranking for the whole site. It also helps search engines better understand your site, as it’s clear which languages you’re providing the content in.

To make all of this work as it should for multilingual SEO, you will need to avoid a translation solution that places all languages on the same page, or uses a # symbol in your address or cookies to determine the language. These methods will negate the SEO boost that a multilingual site can offer, so make sure you structure your translated versions correctly as per Google’s multilingual SEO best practices.

You Can Implement Improved Location Targeting

While a multilingual site will help you to reach a wider international – or a wider ethnic – audience, you still need to understand exactly who you want to target. One important aspect of this is performing keyword research for each of the languages you intend to use.

This can be a much harder part of your efforts to create better multilingual SEO and you may benefit from hiring an SEO team to help you at this point. An experienced multilingual SEO team can conduct the targeted keyword research you need to properly determine which countries and/or languages to aim for.

In order to get the most out of your work, you should also aim to create a multilingual SEO strategy. This will help to ensure users from the locations you want find the right version of your site. For example, it’s not much use to translate your site into French if those within the country see the Spanish version instead.

More Visitors = More Visibility in Search

This last point may seem rather obvious, but it’s worth mentioning as it’s ultimately one of the key factors in any successful SEO strategy. Search engines value quality content and user engagement. If you provide content that drives traffic, Google will notice and rank your site higher as a result.

If you provide content in various languages, driving traffic from specific locations all around the world, or from several different ethnic communities, it will be noticed. Google looks for sites that provide the best possible user experiences. Ensuring your site provides value to your visitors, regardless of language, will help you see improved SEO results.

The Problem With Google Translate

Some people believe that they can add a Google Translate widget or plugin to their site and that will do, in terms of multilingual SEO, But that is far from the case.

Firstly, doing so will not create the additional SEO boosting URLs I mentioned earlier. All it will do is refresh the existing page in a ‘translated by Googlebot’ form. And that is where an even bigger problem arises.

Google Translate is OK. It’s definitely better than it was just five years ago. But does it ever create a translation that a native speaker would consider accurate, or even understandable? Very rarely.

Google Translate is fine for lending you a helping hand if you are trying to order a beer or find a bathroom in a foreign country, but for anything more than that it can be wildly – and sometimes even hilariously inaccurate.

Taking the time to translate your site manually will almost certainly incur greater expense. However, if you serve – or want to serve – a multilingual audience its a must.

Working With Pearl Lemon’s International SEO Team

One of the great strengths of Pearl Lemon as a company is that we have a staff that is comprised of professionals from all over the world. One of the many things that this has allowed us to do is build a multilingual SEO team that can work in a number of different languages and also understand the nuances of several different cultures. Combine that with a strong knowledge of both standard and multilingual SEO best practices and you have a team that is hard to beat when it comes to global SEO.

Interested in multilingual SEO services for your website? Contact us today to learn more.

 

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Vape Store SEO – What It Is, Why You Need It

Vape stores and retailers face a rather interesting – if annoying dilemma in 2019. The industry is booming, in the UK, in the US and across Europe. However, traditional Internet based PPC is out of the question as Google (and Bing) do not accept advertising for tobacco products and they included vape supplies in that ban. So how is a vape supplier supposed to get noticed fast online, the very place where people are looking for the latest products? The answer is via vape store SEO.

Google won’t let you pay for PPC ads, but they will index your website and its content. And they will rank you and your competitors against one another in the order they see fit. If you make good use of SEO, searchers will be able to find you when they are seeking what you sell. The ‘trick’ is, however, that you will need to follow and SEO plan that is a little out of the norm to succeed.

Understanding How People Are Searching For You

The vape market is a fairly specific one, wherever you operate. In terms of ages, the majority of users who vape fall between the ages of 18-29. It’s a ‘young crowd’ and to understand how to target them with SEO you’ll need to understand how they search, and what keywords and keyphrases they use when they do.

For example, e-liquids bring in about 39% of all the revenue made from the vaping market. But ‘e-liquids’ is a clunky, awkward search term that very few vapers would actually use. Vape juice is a far more popular term.

People also search for certain products in very general terms ‘vape pen’, ‘vape tank’ and the will search for ‘buy e-liquid’. These are just a few examples, but the point is that before any vape store SEO campaign can begin there must be some serious keyword research involved.

Setting Up an SEO Friendly Shop

When lots of vape shops get new stock when writing product descriptions they copy and paste what the manufacturer has to say about them. It’s fast, easy, and everyone uses the descriptions, so why not?

The last line IS the problem. Everyone uses the descriptions. Contrary to wildly popular myth, Google won’t penalise you for using the manufacturer copy, but its bots have decide which version of the copy to index first, and sorry to say, the manufacturer is going to win every time.

This means that writing your own, original, keyword optimized descriptions is a vape store SEO must. And they should be written to appeal to your audience as well. By doing this every one of your product descriptions stands a chance of helping you climb the SERPs in a search for that particular offering, no matter how many of your competitors are also selling it.

Get Your Technical SEO S++T Right

Even if your online store is built using an ecommerce platform like Shopify, Magento or Bigcommerce, which are technically ‘shops in a box’ there are right and wrong ways to set up the technical SEO side of things in order for the site to be ‘good’ for SEO.

For instance. Those little meta description boxes for each product. Are yours filled in? And if they are – which many shops don’t bother to do – are those descriptions keyword optimized yet appealing to buyers? They should be, as it is these descriptions that Google will display as search snippets and will use to help determine what you are selling.

The there are images. Are yours original or the manufacturers stock option? Do they have proper ALT tags? Again, if your images are not optimized, you are missing out on a big SEO boost.

Google Image Search – that’s when you hit the tab at the top of a search results page for images – is the third largest search engine of all, after Google itself and YouTube. But Google’s bots can’t see your images, they have to be given a code prompt – in the form of an ALT tag – to see them.

If they are given that prompt they will index them in the Google Image Search. And if your images are original and eye-catching they’ll get noticed by the vapers you want to target more often than they will if you plaster them all over Instagram.

Content Creation is a Must

I get it. You’re busy. Hopefully you are anyway. And despite the fact that you have probably heard that business blogging is great for SEO you don’t really have the time or inclination to blog as well as run your vape shop.

However, by not devoting resources to content creation you are missing out on what is often the biggest vape store SEO boost of all. And not just because you have nothing to feed the content hungry Google Search bots.

Vaping, as you know, is a controversial subject. It has its raving fans – and those are increasing in number – but it also has increasingly vocal detractors. The research on the health effects from vaping is minimal at this point, but that does not stop people from espousing some rather ill-informed opinions.

All of this means that vapers – and especially new or would be vapers – go searching for information they can trust. Your blog can give it to them. Or they search for information about how to vape, or what vaping accessories are the best buys. Your blog can provide them with that information as well, setting you up as an authority in your industry and a trusted source of information. And, at the same time, you can make sure those informative articles include the keywords that will help you rise in the SERPs…

Moving Offsite with Vape Shop SEO

Eventually your SEO campaign has to move offsite and into the big World Wide Web. That excellent content you will be creating will be a large part of that, as it can be leveraged to gain valuable backlinks and shared across the social media platforms your target audience frequent.

If your business has a physical, as well as an online presence, local SEO is something you’ll need to get into, and whether you operate on or offline, or both, directory citations and backlinks need to be created to give you an even bigger SEO boost.

Getting the Help You Need

If you’ve made it this far, the one thing you are probably certain of right now is that this all sounds like a lot of hard work. And it is. In order to be successful, vape store SEO has to be a project embraced fully and executed on an ongoing basis. And did I mention that the SEO tactics you plan out so carefully can be turned upside down in a second if Google issues a major algorithm update? Which they do several times a year? Yes, welcome to the fun world of SEO! Never a dull moment, and things certainly don’t stay the same for long.

The good news is that help is out there. Companies like ours. SEO agencies that don’t pass moral judgements on what you do – yes, we know that some agencies won’t work with you, they don’t work with gambling sites or adult products either – but we will. And we’re good at what we do.Having worked with vape shops before we’ve taken the time to research the industry. And we’re ready to put what we’ve learned to work for you. So give us a call, and start harnessing the undeniable marketing power of vape shop SEO today.

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Gambling Site SEO – Why Is It So Hard?

SEO, in general, is not easy. Actually, SEO is hard. However, gambling site SEO – for a sports betting, poker or online casino site – or an affiliate site built on the gambling promotion model- is especially hard. Hard, but not impossible, as you’ll discover if you read on.

The Importance of Catering to User Needs

These days Google likes websites that offer a great all-around experience to their target audience. And when it finds these sites, it rewards them with higher search placement than their competitors.

Just a few years ago you could get a page to rank well simply by answering a user query directly. That is no longer enough. Now you need to ensure that visitors are satisfied with the answer you give them. If you don’t manage to do that, they’ll bounce off to the next result, Google will take note and your page won’t rank as well, because it did not do its ‘job’.

This is especially crucial in the gambling niche. Most online gamblers of any kind are 1)pretty impatient and want to get started right away and 2) often only search for gambling related queries at a certain time or when they are in a certain mood.

So, if Joe is searching for ‘best poker sign up bonus’ at 11pm when he’s feeling flush that’s exactly what you have to give him. And fast.

If you operate an affiliate site, this is pretty easy. You create a table or infographic like this one to make some easy to see comparisons.

For a gambling site operator however, it’s trickier. Legally it’s unlikely you can make these kinds of direct competitor comparisons. One solution is to update your homepage title to reflect the nature of your current best offers and then ensure that the copy is as helpful and relevant as possible, mixing in terms like ‘highest’ and ‘best’ carefully (so that your legal people don’t start screaming.)

Ensure That Your Site is Easy to Crawl and To Use

Most people in the gambling industry want to present a website that is as visually engaging as possible. After all, whatever the niche you are essentially trying to recreate a real world experience online, whether that is a day at the racecourse or an evening at the casino. And great graphics are often considered an excellent way to do that.

The problem is that some graphics can cause trouble with Google and other search engines. Google is less than happy with sites that still make use of JavaScript. There are some great things you can do with HTML5 which not only Google would love but also your visitors, so ideally that is the way to go in order to please search bots and visitors.

If you need to use JavaScript try implementing dynamic rendering which means that users see one thing and bots see another. This solves the problem of bots not seeing any of your content that is embedded in a script.

Focus On Giving Users What They Want

Find out what your potential customers look for and serve the content all the way through the funnel.

The first thing a potential customer sees is the page title and you must grab them from the start of their sign up journey. Here you have a chance to lure them in, grabbing their interest with a promise.

The page title is more than just a ranking factor and needs to be thought of as a small text ad as it is the very first interaction with a new potential visitor.

Improve Your Meta Descriptions to Improve Your CTR

Google tries to understand what people like by measuring click through rate and it is believed by some that they use it as a ranking signal. This may or may not be true but it’s actually almost irrelevant whether they do or not.

The fact of the matter is that you want to get as many clicks as you can from the SERPs.

There are a number of strategies that can help with improving CTR, from using better headlines, to getting the keywords write in the 160 ish characters you have to work with, to numbers, emojis, and other sort of visually captivating elements.

Unfortunately, there is no one size fits all solution. It will take research and A/B testing to get it right.

One thing is true, though: you title is both your first point of interaction with your potential visitors in Google and also an important ranking factor. You will need to test, adapt, learn and improve.

Improve your Page Load Time

For Google, speed is a ranking factor in a mobile first index world. This means that if you are slower than your competitors, you might not outrank them, even if you have all the other SEO boxes ticked.

Test how fast your site loads with Google’s Pagespeed Insights Tool. Input a few of your competitors URLs to see how they stack up. Take notice of the suggestions you are given for improvement and if you don’t know how to implement them hire someone who does.

Typically, the things that matter for speed are how many requests are sent to the server, how good your CDN is, how many scripts you have, what sort of level of compression you have on images, and whether scripts are kept at a minimum in both quantity and size.

Write Truly Unique Content

Unique content is critical for SEO.. Google expects websites to have unique content so unfortunately there isn’t much you can do about it but being, you know, unique.

Keeping the content unique is a struggle for all websites, though. In the casino business this is particularly tricky for affiliates as they need to write huge amounts of content for each game and operator they review.

The solution is to have dedicated resources for content production. If that’s not your forte, or if you don’t have time, hire someone who does. Your content needs to be keyword driven without being keyword stuffed and it needs to be informative and engaging. That is quite a tall order, and sometimes (most times) only a seasoned SEO copywriter can get it right.

You Need to Build (Good) Links

We have encountered affiliate operators that build thousands of links each year  and then there are those who have built far fewer but rank higher and have stayed on the right side of Google.

Why? Because of those thousands of links, often maybe only a hundred are worth anything. The rest are useless. So the person who takes the time to cultivate good links – by creating great content and developing genuine relationships with publishers and influencers – will win, even if it takes time.

Why is Gambling Site SEO So Hard?

The short answer is that the competition is extremely high and there is little to no organic online coverage.

Operators and affiliate companies fight for the same customers and few publications cover gambling without being either an affiliate or being paid to write about a brand or game.

This means that in order to rank well in Google, you’ll need to up your SEO game significantly. It’s not enough to cover some areas of SEO and try getting away with a semi-optimised website.

To win the SEO game in the online gambling industry, your SEO needs to be at the heart of your digital strategy, and your website performance and user experience need to be phenomenal.

Doing SEO in the Most Competitive of Niches Requires Patience

As you can see, the usual success factors for SEO apply in the casino business too. The difference is that need to nail each and every one of them.

In other words, it’s survival of the most optimized.

And, more importantly, customer expectations are different in the three main categories – casino, sports, poker – are different. Your website offering, therefore, needs to reflect that, both in regards to the overall user experience and SEO.

For instance, if you run a online casino, if users land on a casino games page they expect for the page they visit to:

• Load super fast. How fast? Faster than 3 seconds, ideally
  Display snippets and previews of the game.
  Launch a free version of the game in the browser.
  Have an easy signup page
  Explain the benefit of the game. Data around like RTP (return to player) and jackpots, etc
  To work on all devices. And being mobile friendly means being par with desktop when it come to the entire experience. Are you thinking mobile first?

A poker site, for example, will need to explain why players should play there instead of a huge site like pokerstars.com, have a playable browser game, a customer-targeted look and feel, and offer free signup bonuses. And load fast, especially on mobile.

All of this is a lot. Which is why seeking help is never going to be a bad idea. And yes, you will actually come across SEO agencies that don’t want to work with you, based on some moral objection of some kind, or just a general lack of understanding of the niche. But there are some great agencies out there who are ready to step in. Pearl Lemon is one of them.

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