How to manage multilingual keyword research

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Which content strategy for your multilingual website ?

Understanding your industry keywords is an important part of the content exploration process, but we believe that a sound marketing strategy must come first. You can have the best SEO strategy in the world, but if your website content doesn’t move your customers to action once you get them to your site, then what’s the point? A solid content marketing strategy will help you understand the process of conversion because it delivers on your customers’ needs and expectations. However, we should bear in mind the importance of keywords. By engaging in an extensive keyword research effort, we begin understanding how your future customers think and how they use the search engines, namely Google, works. This is key as most businesses have no idea what their potential customers are searching for. In fact, most websites don’t know nothing about keyword research.

All companies, no matter what their size is, should start to think more like providers of information than ever before. Consumer behavior has drastically changed over the past few years. Customers are more and more accepting content from “non-media” sites, such as corporate websites.This has created a tremendous opportunity for businesses, but customers’ content expectations when going to corporate web sites are higher than ever.If you cannot meet their perception of your brand promise quickly through your web content, they will simply go elsewhere. The best advice is to first listen to them:  identify what your customers need to hear to make their lives better or jobs easier.

what are the steps we might follow to create a sound content strategy ?

1. Identify your content stakeholders – Who are the people in your organization that play a part in getting content published on your site?  Be sure you consider all of these stakeholders in your content strategy.

2.Plan for an iterative content strategy – Like your web site, your content strategy will never end. It’s a cyclical process of planning, creating, publishing and governing. Be sure you have resources in place that are committed to governing your content once it is published.

3.Listen to the web. Chek the forums, visit the social networks and participate in conversations to fully understand your customer’s expectations.

4. Analyse your existing content – make an inventory of all the content you have on your site now. This will give you an idea of how big the content strategy needs to be. Once you have your list, prioritize it. What is essential? What can you rmove? What should you add?

5. Define your strategy – Start at the highest level by defining your site’s overall purpose and content hierarchy. Provide information that you think your content stakeholders will need to make smart decisions about your content. Consider defining some guidelines for future maintenance of the website and of creation of your contenttoo.

6. Detail your strategy – Start with your top priority content and make recommendations for the creation and maintenance of all of your content. Create a template you can use to define parameters for each page including the title, purpose of the page and specific recommendations for writing and maintaining the content. Then, with these strategic recommendations, start to update and create content.

Additional tips:

– Identify what different types of content you want to use – product, text, image, video, pdf etc.

– Map your internal linking requirements – how each page links to other pages on your website – and optimise anchor text.

– Integrate all content into site search results. It might include graphics, audio, video and anything that makes up each page of your web site.

– Define the voice and tone you wish to convey in your content. – Use tools like social bookmarking to encourage content sharing.

– Support user generated content such as customer reviews – use search friendly formats such as RDF to generate this content.

Whenever you are creating content and internal links, relate the copy back to your keyword research to ensure you are maximising your keyword density. However, remember that Keyword spamming will not only irritate customers but will risk the likes of Google thinking worse of your pages, and bear in mind that any content visible to customers must be written to engage them, not just to serve your SEO program.

Deploying a multilingual content strategy

As for multilingual web sites, to have a quality content, you need to “localize” content. What does it mean? The localization, by definition, is the process by which a site or product is tailored to specific linguistic or cultural norms peculiar to the country we are targeting. This process includes the translation of content, modifying the images, colors, etc … and adjusting them to the cultural conventions of the country. In may cases, the end user should be convinced that the site has been developed especially for him, or that the product has been designed for him.

The paradox is that, for a multilingual website to be successful, it should look like a local site. If a product or website is not aligned with the local cultural values, potential customers will feel that it has not been created for them. When a customer detects linguistic or cultural errors, his satisfaction might be modified, which could eventually lead him to postpone buying the product. Why jeopardize customer relations and the long-term success of your company abroad? Therefore, regarding multilingual Web sites, you should consider the localization of content as a valuable investment, so as to ensure high quality communication, and create loyalty among foreign customers.

Winning new markets abroad: the untapped international online market

As the internet economy keeps on growing in a difficult economic outlook, business owners have the opportunity to search for new customers beyond their national frontiers.  The easy access to websites have made the consumers in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and South America a potential goldmine for marketers. The targeting of local consumers has become a major objective for most export oriented companies. While Google is indisputably the number one channel for search, and to generate sales leads, there are many other ways of searching on the internet.The emergence of social medias is starting to challenge the domination of the search market by Google. This market dynamic has given rise to internet marketing strategies like Geo targeting – which  could be described as making your website visible to prospective consumers in foreign markets. Very few companies can afford to miss over half a billion potential online users of the European market if your online offers are only being seen in your local market.

The new focus on international search marketing

Search Engines have still the major role in this frantic world of online persuasion. It is increasingly difficult for   search engine optimizationspecialists and search engine copywriters to get the unknown products and services of their clients to the top of search engine results. The old idea of “if you build a website, your customers will come” is no longer applicable, especially in competitive international markets. Then, we should ask ourselves can we employ the same SEO strategy for Spain, France or Japan? Will it yield the same ROI or sales conversion?

First, we should deal with the issues of language and characters. Your organization could have similar web sites written in different languages for different targeted country. Of course, only large projects can afford having multiple versions of their website in multiple languages: But if you want to target the European market, it is important to recall that roughly 50% of online users in Europe are located in Germany, France, or the United Kingdom. So to reach out over half of European online users, we only have to localize the websites for English, German and French speakers.

But we should bear in mind that translation is not enough, and companies are often neglecting to take into account concepts of search marketing by not including the basics as part of their internationalization process. Web design companies often focus their efforts onclickability and usability factors by covering branding, look and feel, content generation and publishing.

However, equally important, the findability  factors are left behind. Findability can be described as how easy it is for your potential customers community to find the content and resources they need to do their jobs.  A global website will not be as successful, should proper methods of Search Engine Optimization, Information Architecture or even Paid Advertisement are not used when being built.
Websites need to be found on the first pages of Search Engines’ natural results or paid listings. Careful thought has to be given to keyword research, internal link structure, valid coding and other related subjects such as local backlinks that will influence the performance of a site. Having great content in the local language created by local translators considering cultural aspects is not enough if the text is not optimized with the most important keywords that people are searching for.

So, if we have to summarize, we would have to say that the most important factors in ranking well internationally (in order) would be:
1)Content of the website (keyword density, including the an address on each page with the name of country, name of city, language)
2)Local backlinks
3)Social networks

Take into acount the culture of search in the country you are targeting

The traditional marketers would agree that cultural aspects do play a significant role in marketing strategies of large corporations. On the internet, this also true. Regarding, content, for SEO implementation, one must deal with content writing and multimedia objects that enhance communication and conversion, taking into account the local culture.

Regarding the use of Search engines, this is also true. The importance of Google as a business channel is indisputable, but in some countries there are alternative search engines. In China, the local search engine is Baidu (with over 60% reach) – while Google captures roughly 25% of Chinese searchers.

So, while Google today plays a significant part in the developing of an internet marketing strategy, a good understanding of the local culture, language, and search behavior is paramount for success.

Using social networks to connect with your customers…

The face of social networks changed with the emergence of Facebook. However, even before Facebook, the cyberspace was reverberating with innovative social players like MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Flickr. Today, social network profiles are being used as corporate billboards to announce new products and services. We all know the value of consumption pattern  and consumer psychology in marketing strategy, but it takes a huge effort to understanding the mindset of a consumer prior to the purchase. That’s where these social networks act as a bridge between buyers and the sellers. So, while business owners are busy on social networks connecting with potential customers, consumer behavior is also being extracted, providing a wealth of information for new business actions.

Today, proactive companies use social media to build long-term relationships and to establish communication between the customer,  themselves, and the larger community. It is quite simple to use a social and business networking site such as LinkedIn.com to connect with your potential prospects in Asia, Europe, North America, and beyond. Yes, it is also true that many individuals and firms are able to conduct business in English. A multilingual website not only ensures a higher conversion rate but also create e better communication channel with your potential customers. However, imagine how your use of foreign languages, cultures, and symbols could substantially increase your chance of success.