Aleyda Solis will be speaking on SEO Strategy at SearchFest 2016, which is being held March 10th, 2016 at the Sentinel Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I’m an international SEO consultant, I have my own consultancy business called Orainti. With Orainti I help from startups to multinational businesses to establish and grow their organic search presence, with a focus on multilingual and multicountry, as well as technical & multidevice, with a strategic approach based on their business operations & model. I also blog (at Search Engine Land, Moz & State of Digital) & speak at events (around 60 events in 15 countries, in English & Spanish).
I’ve been working in SEO since 2007. Before becoming independent I worked in the past at digital marketing agencies as well as an in-house specialist in both small and big companies. I’ve been the specialist myself as well as managed teams too, for European and American companies.
2) What is the best way to translate an English site into another language while retaining maximum usability, readability, and searchability / rankability?
The best way to connect is going as granular as possible with your target audience, localizing instead of just “translating”: Ideally, you would target countries instead of languages, because each one despite speaking the same language, might have their own specific terms to search for your service, product or business, seasonality, search trends, behavior and ecosystem of competitors with different set of USPs and authority that you will need to compete with. Because it’s not really about retaining, but about making it grow from scratch with a new audience, while making the most from your background and historical presence in your initial markets.
It’s therefore a must to identify all of these unique characteristic for each one of the specific country markets you want to target so based on them you can set a viable SEO strategy that will be competitive and allow you to optimize & promote your presence accordingly for each one of them in a competitive way.
On the other hand, you might find situations where you identify that the audience on each of these countries independently is not big enough to compensate the work and effort to target them independently, or when independent target is not as important due to the site business model, industry or topic (for example, a tech blog where geolocating might be far less relevant and worthy than with an ecommerce business); so in these cases you might want to start targeting language instead of country markets.
In all cases though, it’s imperative to think that is not only about just translating, but doing a real research on how each country or language search, their search behavior and preferences and the unique ecosystem around them. In the same line, is not only about changing the content accordingly, but the overall Web experience, from the URLs, the navigation, even the organization, colors or branding.
3) Do the nuances for ranking well and generating relevant traffic in Google’s Non-English algorithms you’re familiar with vary much or are they similar to Google in English?
Definitely! Google always launch all their updates, from new functionalities to algorithms first in the US, and then in other markets, usually the UK afterwards (as is easier to take it to other English speaking markets I guess with a mature Web ecosystem) and then from there to other European markets and then worldwide.
The reality is that even when the “same” or similar releases have been finally published in all markets they certainly don’t work in the same way. Search for anything competitive, even in larger latin american markets and you will still see that there are EMDs with little unique value behind or other type of pages -some with a very spammy link profile- ranking high, which wouldn’t certainly rank anymore in the US market or Europe. At the end of the way Google can’t just extrapolate and apply the same “rules” & “filters” in markets where the number of Webs, and their link and content characteristics are different, as they might end-up with no sites to rank at all 🙂
It’s normal then that these filters and functionalities are different and depend on the market web ecosystem characteristics. This, in my opinion, makes international markets highly attractive to invest in… because of your know how and experience in far more competitive markets, it will be much easier to achieve results in these other much less competitive ones (if you take also into consideration the “localization” aspect, of course).
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.