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.