Foreign Search Engines
It may be shocking to some to realize that English is not the only language in the world. The facts indicate that internet use among non-English speakers is rapidly growing and actually less than 30 percent of all web users speak English and over half of the Google searches are in languages other than English. Research indicates that most users who are shopping online are reluctant to make a purchase from a site that is not in their native language, and that is understandable. This means that there are numerous possibilities of marketing to native speakers in their own languages.
Why use non-English SEO?
There is a huge opportunity to target native speakers of foreign languages. In just the US, 20% of the population speaks a language other than English in their homes. Nearly 90% of Hispanic Americans speak only Spanish in their homes. And in the UK businesses might consider a Polish site since there are about half a million of native speakers there. It can be a challenge to master SEO strategies in your own language without even considering other languages. The primary reason to launch a campaign in another language is the purchasing potential. Hispanic Americans have a purchasing power of more than $1.2 trillion according to the latest statistics. Native Polish speakers have an estimated purchasing power of £4 billion. It can be worthwhile to target domestic markets.
Google is not the Only Search Engine
When reaching multilingual audiences, one thing to take into consideration is that even though Google is the largest search engine in the world, it is not the only one. Yahoo! is the leading search engine in Japan, but in South Korea most use their own search, Naver. Google has not done well in the Chinese market because of pronunciation issues. Until just a few years ago it was “Gu Ge.” Since the Russian language can be complex, Yandex is one of the only searches that can handle it effectively. To effectively strategize multilingual SEO campaigns, it is important to become familiar with this wide variety of search engines. Even though Japan uses Yahoo! which is still powered by Google, it conducts search in slightly different manner. For instance, it prefers a keyword density of 7 to 8 percent and it puts more emphasis on directory listings. This would mean that to rank for this audience the first two steps would include rewriting content to include more keywords and submitting the sites to relevant directories.
Yandex works very similar to Google for ranking sites but it will put more weight on links. It will look for both in bound and out bound links to relevant sites. But Yandex does not consider links that come from sites like web forums or computerized sites that are not directly controlled by humans. Yandex also lets a site have up to 7 geo tags which is great for local SEO strategies. But this search engine places penalties on sites that have excessive ads, banners or pop-ups.
Baidu is another search but its crawlers are not as powerful as Google’s. This search will give a lot more weight to meta-tags but pay a lot less attention to links that are inbound. When optimizing for Baidu you will want to keep keywords and the most important information in titles and near the tops of pages. This search engine will favor titles, alt text and optimized image titles. Google prefers high quality links from relative sites but Baidu just likes quantity so even low ranking sites that are linked to the page will help increase the site’s ranking in SERPs.
Link Building
One of the other SEO strategies to use with the multilingual approach is link building. One of the best places to start is web directories for each related country. It is also important to build back links to the site. Social media strategies can be beneficial in helping to build back links as well as increase contacts. But it is important to note that Facebook and Twitter are not as popular elsewhere and these are still banned in areas like China. For Japanese users you may want to look at Mixi and for Russians you’ll need to consider VKontakte.
SEO for other languages can look like a very difficult struggle but it is doable. Optimizing a site for the foreign market will take some time and just like any SEO strategies results may take some time to show up. But SEO can end up offering some great ROIs and help to reach the global audience which continues to increase.