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How to Boost your SEO with Translation

Author: Andreea Balaoiu

How to Boost your SEO with Translation

Gone are the days when businesses would fear the resource overhead of implementing a thorough Translation and Localization strategy to penetrate new markets.

In the post-covid 19 landscape, a growing number of brands are seeking instead to monopolize the huge advantage that Translation and Localization pose in building their international SEO foothold.

From digital application infrastructure to customer-fronted content, good SEO is instrumental to an even greater business development momentum for any brand, tying in with a seamless ASO strategy.

SEO versus ASO

Semrush, a leading all-in-one marketing insight suite for improving online brand visibility, defines SEO or Search Engine Optimization as:

“the art and science of persuading search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, to recommend your content to their users as the best solution to their problem.” 

The most notable SEO benefit is boosting organic or “free” traffic, namely when a search engine shows specific content to its users in the organic part of a SERP (Search Engine Results Page), without having to pay for achieving a certain favourable ranking.

Alternatively, the IT engineers and data storytellers from Storemaven define ASO or App Store Optimization in their 5 Components of a Winning ASO Strategy (storemaven.com) blog post as “a strategy which is a subset of a broader app marketing, SEO and growth strategy, aiming to work together to increase an app's visibility in the app stores as well as improving its ability to convert app store visitors to installs and users.”

As a lot of potential customers absolutely love to consume content in their own language, specifically tailored to their wants and needs, the benefit of localizing a brand’s website is not only an increase in the overall SERP ranking, but also helping the brand hit the right target keywords and become increasingly more relevant than their competitors in the eyes of the consumer.

How to Boost your SEO with Translation and Localization

1. Thorough local keyword research

Keywords are very specific, and their relevancy varies from country to country. High-quality Keyword density is directly linked to a high ranking, as well as relevancy-based results.

Some notable examples are mostly derived from American versus British English keywords:

[car rental] vs. [car hire] within the transportation rental industry

or

[holiday] vs. [vacation] in the tourism industry

When penetrating a specific market in view of scaling their business with international audiences, it is of paramount importance for brands to perform thorough keyword research on the most popular ones within a specific niche, as well as their related long-tail keyword variations, thus increasing the chances of reaching a wider audience spectrum with their content.

2. Relevant Meta descriptions and Alt Texts

Point 1 goes hand in hand with content optimization using the option to embed popular keywords within the digital content, in the form of metadata: titles, meta descriptions, and meta tags.

Meta descriptions are the elements online users see and perceive while scrolling through search result hits. Usually, meta descriptions are original phrases or expressions, serving as a beacon to attract users’ attention to click and check out the in-depth content on a certain page.

ALT texts or tags are the elements that appear instead of a picture, whenever it cannot be displayed, ensuring that online visitors still understand what that image represents, being very valuable for search engine “crawling”, when SEO bots visit and download page content, extracting links to discover additional content.

High-quality Keyword Translation and Meta Description Localization must be well-played out, with the right target market and culturally specific focus required to attract more relevant traffic.

3. Know your audience inside-out

In the context of digital marketing, American-Austrian consultant Peter Drucker highlights the potency of search engines as means of increasing the exposure of any business product in his famous quote:

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

Peter Drucker

Search engines tackle this problem by creating a web structure and providing relevant answers (search queries) to users, using the following steps:

1) Crawl – a search engine explores the internet for content and scans (parses) the code and content of each website URL it finds.

2) Index – the indexing process involves the storage, assessment, and organization of the crawled content, which will be displayed later in the users' search queries.

3) Rank – provides a user with pieces of content that best match their search queries by displaying the most relevant results first and the least relevant last.

Consequently, to become high-ranking, a website needs to undergo a thorough Translation and SEO facelift, ensuring that it has the right keyword density relevant to specific search queries.

4. Cultural adaptation and appropriation

Sun Yifeng states in her article “Cultural Translation in the Context of Glocalization” (Cultural Translation in the Context of Glocalization | (researchgate.net)), that “localization is the adaptation and translation of a text (like a software program) to suit a particular reception situation. At the initial stage of selecting texts for translation, the suitability of a given text for the target reader is assessed, which constitutes part of a larger consideration of local consumption. Localization in relation to translation entails various forms of adaptation for different reasons or purposes, which means restrictiveness and exclusivity, resulting in the separation of the source text from the target text.”

High search engine rankings, as well as user retention, are inherently linked to the accuracy of the specific content to the audience cultural framework. While high bounce rates indicate weak SEO and limited keyword density, a high number of pages per session shows that accurate Keyword Translation and Localization can get any website content back in Google’s algorithm’s good graces.

The Bottom Line

SEO is instrumental to boosting web traffic, but also increase sales revenue, helping businesses tap into uncharted territories, establish a strong, content-based foothold, and distinguish themselves from the competition.

High Quality SEO is inextricably linked to a thorough Translation and Localization strategy, leveraging skill, experience, research, and effort to be effective.

Get in touch with the language experts at AD VERBUM and start your translation journey towards a new market and audience today. Learn more about our specialized SEO Translation and localization services, and how we can help you shape your content strategy with our blog insights 6 SEO Benefits of Website Localization - AD VERBUM.

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