In the age of universal access to the Internet, we have transferred much of the promotion into the virtual sphere, giving rise to such phenomena as e-marketing, e-commerce and e-business. The potential of digitisation has been recognised by entrepreneurs from all over the world, who are putting more and more effort into building their online branding. This way, not only can they reach out to potential customers from their own country, but also to a foreign audience.
However, this would not be possible without SEO translations which enable multilingual positioning. The role of the translator and their work in this process has a significant impact on building a particular company’s position in the market. What does SEO translation involve and what distinguishes it from standard translation?
SEO – what is it?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a process that aims to optimise websites for search engines in order to increase their visibility and gain worthwhile site traffic. What exactly does it mean? With the right mechanisms and strategies, such as key phrases or localisation, we can influence the position of a page in search results and thus increase the number of visits by users. The higher the position of the website in the search engine, the bigger the number of visits and the greater the chance for gaining new customers. This whole process is named positioning.
Thanks to SEO, companies can reach not only their native audience, but also gain foreign customers by creating websites in different languages. At this point, translators come into action. Their job is to translate content while keeping optimisation in mind.
SEO translation vs. standard translation
SEO involves the translation of texts meant for online publication, which means website content. Whether it is a target website, a blog article or a product description, this type of text has additional elements that need to be considered by translators in their work. These elements are HTML attributes such as meta descriptions, URL or infographic descriptions. Each of them should be of right length and contain the proper key phrases in order to point the content of the site in a concise, clear, and compelling way.
In search of key phrases
Key phrases are nothing more than the phrases most frequently searched for by users – thanks to them, the search engines may quickly and easily direct us towards what we are looking for. Given the profound impact on positioning, without properly defined key phrases, even the finest product can get lost in the clutter of hundreds of thousands of other pages and, as a result, fail to reach its target audience.
If we have already determined the keywords for our site, this does not guarantee that it will not be required to repeat this process to make our content available in other languages. This is due to both lexical and cultural differences. Carrying out an analysis and identifying the phrases most frequently searched for by users in a particular country is a task usually carried out in collaboration between an SEO agency and a translator. Besides all this, the type of search engine should also be taken into account – although most regions use Google, in China, for example, Baidu search engine plays a much greater role. The next stage is placing out the ‘keys’ in texts, headlines and meta descriptions. Here, the translator’s intuition is especially important as they have to insert a correct number of phrases in a way that sounds natural to the recipient.
The importance of localisation
Localisation is a strategy used not only in regular translation but also a procedure that has a major role in SEO translation. Its goal is to adapt the text to a country-specific audience. Content such as product descriptions or blog articles are strongly affected by culture, and without proper localisation the information included in them might be unclear or of a low-value for people from other parts of the world. Adapting the text to the cultural requirements prevailing in the given country is a guarantee of success in reaching a foreign customer. If we need to direct our material to English-speaking audiences from all over the world, it is usually not enough to prepare a single translation into English. The same text needs to be addressed separately to people from Great Britain, the United States, Australia or India, and localised each time.
Translation of SEO texts is a complicated process that requires the translator to have a great knowledge not only in regard to the language but also to the mechanisms ruling positioning and e-marketing. A good idea is to entrust this task to a competent company, which will guarantee that it is carried out professionally. At Alingua, we offer SEO translations and content localisation in 85 languages. We cooperate with SEO specialists and native speakers from all over the world, so you can be sure that our translations meet both marketing requirements and optimisation criteria, and the localised content responds to the needs of a foreign audience.
