Optimizing your website for search engines has become a necessity today. With most traffic to websites being driven from search engines, it is now a question of ‘how’ to make your website search engine-friendly rather than ‘if’. While search engine optimization (SEO) is a great first step towards making money from your website, it is still only the first.
If you want to increase the reach of your website and expand your client manifold in a cost-effective way, you need multilingual search engine optimization. Here are 5 reasons why multilingual SEO can transform your business prospects.
Increased Reach
Studies indicate that only about 30% of Internet users have English as their first or second language. This means that if your website is only in English, you are missing out on more than two-thirds of the digital market. Chinese users number second among Internet users, with a presence ranging around 20%. Excluding English and in addition to Chinese, other languages such as Spanish, Arabic, and Portuguese make up about 55% of the market. If you have a multilingual website, you will cater to more than 80% of the Internet market.
Cost-Effective
The cost of running a unilingual website and a multilingual website are more or less the same.
You won’t need to create separate websites from scratch for each new language in which you want to offer your content. You can optimize your present website for different languages. This increases your reach and is cost-effective at the same time.
An International Profile
Multilingual SEO will expand your horizons and give you an international audience. It will show that your concern is an international player with soaring ambitions. It will also give you connections and business opportunities in areas you might never have contemplated.
Competitive Edge
Multilingual SEO can make you stand out among competitors. As many websites don’t bother going for multilingual SEO (deciding that optimizing their websites for English Internet users alone will drive their business forward), this is a relatively sparse field. You will be amongst those who gain the most.
Customer Satisfaction
Non-English users and those more comfortable in their native language sometimes use translation services available on modern browsers to understand website content that is in English. However, this is hardly a satisfactory solution. A customer is much more likely to opt for a website that speaks to him in his own tongue over other websites that require him to do the heavy-lifting of translating. A satisfied customer, as they say, is the greatest advertisement.
Nice post.