According to a study by CSA Research, two in every five consumers won’t buy from websites that aren’t written in their native language.
And our own work with eCommerce website Wallpaper Direct has demonstrated the huge upturn in sales that launching a country-specific website can have – a 535% increase in turnover in France in the first year after launching the French website, to be exact.
But, while creating foreign-language versions of a website may satisfy the first of these points, it doesn’t guarantee the second.
In the world of AI, anyone can now create an entire website in any language they wish to. But a website that converts in every language? Well that’s a different matter.
The truth is, the advent of AI has made content creation in every major language accessible to everyone. But not all content is created equal.
So how do you avoid creating multilingual content for content’s sake?
How do you create multilingual content that converts?
- Content creation that goes beyond AI and values the culturally aware, nuanced human in the loop
- Optimisation by a local, native-speaker
So where do keywords fit into all of this?
It may be tempting to take your perfectly crafted, optimised English content and get the AI tool of the month to translate it into French, German, Spanish, and the rest, before hitting the “go live” button and sitting back waiting for the sales to flood in.
But like all shortcuts, this approach is potentially too good to be true.
There’s a reason you invested so much time and money in creating and optimising your English content – the keyword research and mapping, content briefs, on-page optimisation, and the hours of copywriting.
We know and understand the importance of well-crafted content when it comes to conversions.
And we know and understand the importance of optimised landing pages when it comes to ranking in the SERPs.
And, while it may be tempting to presume these same rules don’t apply to non-English content, native speakers of other languages will be quick to tell you that poorly written content and bad, inaccurate translations are a bad look for the brand.
And the SERPs will show that presuming direct translations of optimised English pages are optimised and will rank in the same way is an error.
The truth is, localising keywords matters.
Languages don’t match up 1:1. They all have their own nuances, phraseology, cultural influences and layers that just don’t translate directly. And when you pair this with search behaviour and how people from different cultures actually use search engines and AI prompts, you soon realise that if you rely on direct translations of English keywords functioning in different markets, you’re missing a trick.
How to ensure your multilingual landing pages rank
Landing pages need to be optimised for the correct keywords. If you are localising your on-page content, you need to first localise the keywords.
This does not mean take your seed list of English keywords and paste it into DeepL.
It means working with a local SEO expert (or SEO translation company) so they can utilise their knowledge of the local market and conduct keyword research based on the English keywords.
We’ve written plenty about multilingual keyword research and keyword localisation elsewhere so I won’t go into it here, but the key thing to note is keyword localisation is not replacing the English keyword with the direct translation – it is weighing up the various ways of expressing the same idea, applying local search habits and comparing local search volumes to identify the best equivalent keyword for the market in question.
From keywords to optimised landing pages
Once you have identified the keywords you need to target, you then need to tweak the on-page content to incorporate these.
In some cases, it will be a fairly simple task; in others, it will involve rewriting headings, sentences and even full paragraphs.
Again, the key is working with a native speaker who understands the local market.
Here at LEaF Translations, proofreading & optimisation is quickly becoming our most popular service.
We’re often called into action by clients and agencies who’ve tried the AI shortcut method for multilingual content creation and have realised it doesn’t work.
We set our local teams to work, localising the target keywords and then rewriting and optimising the on-page content so it includes the correct search terms for the market in question in a way that lands with the locals. At the same time, we proofread and improve the AI-generated content so it makes sense and becomes content that has a chance of converting; rather than generic, bland content that fails to inspire.
Needless to say, our SEO translations result in higher-quality content but not everyone has the budget to pay for wholesale translations from scratch. Unfortunately, thinking that you can avoid paying anything at all by relying on AI is often a false economy.
Even if there is little upfront cost, there is no point launching multilingual websites that won’t rank and won’t convert.
