Multilingual SEO – Establishing Online Visibility On Foreign Markets

13/11/2009

By Orad Elkayam, SEO Strategist

In today's highly competitive market, online presence is essential for every company's success and growth. High ranking in search engine results not only brings targeted traffic and increases conversions, but also establishes a business as an authority in a particular industry.

With Google being one of the most credible sources of information in the world and its number of searches reaching more than 6.8 billion per month , investing in search engine optimization (SEO) has become a necessity. Research has shown that users rarely go beyond the top 30 results on search engine pages; thus...

...higher rankings are essential to increase online visibility and traffic.

When expanding into international markets, it is critical to understand that English is not used by the majority of Internet users-only 28.7% of the entire Web population uses English. Chinese is the Internet's second largest language, spoken by 321 million online users whose number has grown by 894% in the last eight years. Spanish, as the third most popular language on the Web, represents 131 million online users who are located not just in Spain but also in Mexico, most of Central and South America and a significant portion of the United States. Japanese, French, Portuguese and German are currently among the top 10 languages spoken by millions of Internet users around the world.

In order to speak to foreign audiences, translating content is a necessity, but this is not enough. Localization into chosen languages is the first step of a multilingual marketing strategy which can substantially increase the number of potential clients. Every language has its own nuances which have to be taken into consideration when targeting users from different cultures. What people refer to as a "cell phone" in American English... continued on page two >

 

 

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