Are you taking all the right measures to strengthen your SEO game? If not, this blog is your call to learn about the technicalities of SEO, multilingual SEO, hreflang to boost your search engine rankings.

Often times we come across global websites that appear with a prompt to change the language of preference. Ever wondered how that happens? That’s the magic of multilingual SEO!

However, there’s a lot more to it than it appears. To make your website content accessible to all, you need to be mindful of certain SEO technicalities that, if overlooked, may adversely affect your website’s ranking.

In this blog, we talk about the basics of multilingual SEO, along with key definitions. We have also provided some insights into how Drupal offers a powerful platform for creating and optimizing a multilingual website. To make things clearer, we delve into the “how” with a guide on using hreflang effectively and highlight common mistakes to avoid.

So, grab your reading glasses as this one’s going to be a long, interesting, and insightful read. Go!

What is Multilingual SEO

Multilingual SEO is the process of enhancing your website accessibility by removing the language barrier. This approach is based on language to localize your website content into multiple languages by preference. This means your target audience goes beyond your locale (region or country).

Why is Multilingual SEO important

The answer is quite straightforward: to make your website content accessible to all! Businesses today have the scope of expanding worldwide. The Internet is the best-proven way to reach global customers. Thus, effective communication with a diverse audience is essential. Multilingual SEO is the perfect tool to meet this global demand.

Let’s break this down into the following to understand the need for professional multilingual SEO services better:

• Global target audience: With multiple languages to communicate with a wider audience effectively, a multilingual website can grab the attention of users around the world.
• Higher SEO ranking: Google and other search engines prioritize translated versions of your website as part of one and drive traffic to the main website. Hence, it creates a compound SEO ranking effect and helps rank your website higher in search results.
• Increased website traffic: With a global audience as the target, optimizing global multilingual SEO via multilingual websites helps attract more traffic compared to a monolingual site.
• Better user experience: Given the remedy of language barriers, users can have a better experience browsing through your website. They can view your website in their native language, properly understand your services, and make an informed decision with a seamless user experience.

NOTE: Here’s an important note before you get confused between multilingual and multiregional SEO.

Multiregional SEO optimizes your website for different regions or countries. On the contrary, multilingual SEO optimizes your website for multiple languages within a state, a country, or across the world.

How Drupal makes it easy for Multilingual SEO

Drupal is a CMS that makes it easier for developers to create multilingual sites. It not only offers an open-source platform but its automated language translation allows you to reach a wider audience with localization of your site content.

Taking it one step further, Drupal's latest offering with AI enables content editors to create, translate, and manage large content with ease. AI capabilities handle translation with ease and ensure seamless multilingual support for a website. You can learn more about the Drupal AI module here.

Here is an example of one of the projects we recently worked on – SEMI wanted a multilingual, multisite platform powered by Drupal. Take a look at how we did it!

Drupal Translation Modules

Drupal 10 offers four essential translation modules to help create multilingual websites:

• Language Module – It enables you to add and manage multiple languages on your Drupal site. It lets users configure language options, assign languages to content, and choose how languages are applied to various pages.
• Content Translation Module - You can translate content entities like comments, custom blocks, taxonomy terms, and users. It allows you to localize all site content, including pages and blocks, into multiple languages.
• Interface Translation Module - This module handles the translation of the Drupal core interface, along with any added modules and themes.
• Configuration Translation Module - It provides a translation tool for settings and configurations, allowing you to translate labels, site names, view names, and text used within Views.

Content plays a key role in the success of a multilingual website, and Drupal’s core modules streamline this process of creating and managing multilingual content. In addition to translating content, Drupal modules help translate website elements into a language used across the website.

Customize & Synchronize

Furthermore, while the core modules handle the content and website elements, Drupal also allows you to customize and synchronize translations, ensuring that certain elements remain consistent across languages while others can be tailored. This helps content admins optimize linguistic nuances while maintaining the consistency of the website content.

Additional Compatibility

SEO-specific modules like MetaTag and Schema are compatible with multilingual websites and allow users to customize their meta tags and structured data to match the language.

Hreflang

Drupal automatically manages the Hreflang attributes, providing signals to search engines about which version of a page to show based on user language and regional settings. Additional tags need not be placed for language-specific pages, making the content creation and translation seamless. 

If you want to learn about creating a multilingual website using Drupal, read our detailed blog about it.

How does Multilingual SEO differ from regular SEO practices

Let’s understand this in sequence. When we hear SEO, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Keywords! After all, that’s the basic concept we all have – use appropriate keywords to rank your content higher on search results. This is what we know as regular SEO practices. It focuses on targeting relevant keywords in a single language to help your website rank higher.

On the contrary, multilingual SEO focuses on optimizing your web content on different search engines prioritizing language. Multilingual SEO takes up your SEO game further by a notch by adapting your web content and experience to different languages.

For better search engine rankings and to drive higher traffic to your website, both regular and multilingual SEO are two crucial elements you cannot miss.

Understanding language targeting

As the name suggests, language targeting targets ads or related content to your users based on their language. It might be confusing to differ between translating your content and localizing your content as these two elements are closely related to each other. Both of them are crucial for SEO purposes.

Although both processes involve adapting content to a particular language and cultural context, however, there lies a difference between translation and localization.

Translation Vs. Localization

Translation is the process of converting text from one language to another. Localization, on the other hand, defines the comprehensive process of adapting a product or content for a specific market.

• Translation: It’s the process of converting the source language to the target language to cover a wider audience. When you translate your site pages, you convert your existing content into another language and adjust its style and tone based on the source language. Translation only translates the language of your content, keeping the accurate meaning of the source content unchanged.
• Localization: Localization is meant to adapt your content to specific sets of audiences. For instance, there are different dialects within Spain, Mexico, and Argentina where Spanish is the main language. Through localization, your content can be adapted to the dialects of the different regions, making it relatable to each group of audience.

Translation is only one single aspect of localization. It is indeed an essential part of a robust localization strategy that involves a whole team of translators, local marketers, and consultants. This team ensures that the website content or product adapts to the target audience.

Content strategy for Multilingual SEO

To maximize your visibility in search engines and do the right things to optimize your multilingual SEO, here’s a preplanned content strategy for you:

Culturally Relevant Content for Each Language is Crucial

Make sure to create content that resonates with the target audience in each region. A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work in diverse markets. Your content must reflect local customs, values, and preferences to connect with users effectively.

Avoid Direct Translation: Adapt Content to Local Context

Direct translations can lead to awkward or irrelevant messaging. Instead of translating word-for-word, content should be localized, taking into account cultural nuances, idioms, and tones that match the local market.

Keyword Research for Different Languages

Search behavior varies by region. Conduct thorough keyword research for each language, understanding local search terms and slang. Keywords that perform well in one language may not have the same impact in another, which makes this research even more crucial.

Create Language-Specific Sitemaps and Optimize for International Search Engines

Creating sitemaps for each language ensures that search engines index your content properly. Optimizing for local search engines like Yandex (Russia) or Baidu (China) is also essential, as these platforms have different algorithms and ranking factors than Google.

Tools and techniques for language-specific SEO

Search engine Optimization is mostly about how you do it right and there’s no one way to it. However, if you’re smart, you’ll use tools to apply the best practices. You may have heard about SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Translate, etc. These are tools that help you in keyword research in multiple languages.

Quality keyword research allows your translation and localization efforts put to an effective purpose. It helps realize the types of keywords that grab more attention for different translated versions.

Ahrefs and SEMrush are two practical tools that help you find the search volumes of your desired keywords in multiple languages. Finding the appropriate use of keywords can be daunting, more so, in multiple languages. Thanks to these tools that help you make the process relatively easier.

Once you have your list of keywords with their search volume, you can use tools like TranslatePress to speed up your process of finding accurate translations of your keywords. However, it’s important to run a manual check once the tools have done their work for machinery cannot grant 100% accuracy at all times.

Google Translate Vs. Professional translation services

The need for effective communication across languages is rising more than ever. That’s why marketing and SEO experts resort to Google Translate and other professional tools to generate instant translations to the desired language. However, there’s a strong debate going on questioning the accuracy of these automated tools compared to professional translators. Let’s understand it better.

Advantages of using Google Translate

• Convenient and Accessible: It’s free and easily available at the tip of your fingers, anytime anywhere with an active internet connection and hence, it’s convenient to many users.
• Speed: Google Translate does its work in a flash. Users in need of instant results prefer this tool to grab a quick understanding of content in time-sensitive scenarios. Whether you a quick explanation of a foreign piece of content or struggle to communicate in a different language, Google Translate can solve your problem instantly. 

Advantages of Using Professional Translation Tools

• Accurate: Professional translators are basically expert linguists whose effectiveness usually outperforms that of Google Translate. They have an in-depth knowledge of both the source and target languages, making it reliable for the precision and accuracy of language translation.
• Domain Experts: You can find different domain experts specializing in specific fields with a deep understanding of relevant terminologies with accuracy and clarity. This is why you find professional translators with accurate translation services in legal, medical, and technical fields.
• Style and Tone: Professional translators are skilled enough to adapt your content to the style and tone of the target language and audience to suit their requirements. They know how to maintain the distinction between different sets of target audiences.
• Confidential and Secure: Professionalism and confidentiality work hand-in-hand in terms of professional translation services. They maintain highly secure measures to safeguard your information during the translation process. Professional translators have NDAs and secure data transfer protocols in place to respect the privacy and security of their clients. 

Choosing the right tool or service for the nature of the job you have is the approach you should take when it comes to choosing between Google Translate and Professional translation services. 

While Google Translate can be a great tool for personal usage, professional translation services should be your go-to approach to meet your professional translation demands that need specific domain knowledge, quality, and accuracy. Before choosing between the two, make sure to understand the strengths and limitations of each.

The what, why, and how of Hreflang tags

Multilingual SEO is a wide concept and it needs tools and techniques to meet the perfect requirements. In this section, we talk about hreflang tags, why they matter, and how to implement them. Later, we move on to learn the mistakes you should avoid in establishing a multilingually optimized website.

What are Hreflang tags

Hreflang attribute or hreflang tag is an HTML attribute meant to specify a particular language and geographical targeting of a site page. If you have different versions of one main page in multiple languages, hreflang tag helps Google narrow down these variations and serve the appropriate version to the users.

Why are Hreflang tags important

Hreflang tags are basically assistants to search engines to help serve the appropriate content to different sets of users speaking different dialects. Here’s how they matter:

It boosts your international SEO ranking 

International SEO involves optimizing your web content for different languages and regions. This increases the visibility of and the traffic to your website, thus, boosting your international SEO performance. If Spanish speakers look for “zapatillas,” Canadians look for “runners” and the US audience looks for “sneakers,” Google will narrow its search results accordingly and take it to your page in the respective languages distributed among different regions. Using hreflang tags on every page of your website helps create regional-specific content that results higher in search results for users who look for it.

It improves the user experience

Using hreflang attributes helps cover a wider audience, thus, increasing the traffic to your website. For example, a business website serving international clients can redirect users to pages available in their native languages. This delivers a seamless user experience. When your audience has a good experience visiting your site, they’re most likely to explore the rest of the site as well and become potential customers.

It avoids duplicate content issues

Search engines often get confused with potentially or completely duplicate content over the web. Using hreflang attributes can help avoid such issues. If your website has identical content but in different languages, hreflang tags tell search engines that although the content may be similar, they’re meant for two different sets of audiences. When implemented properly, hreflang tags help avoid the issues of duplicate content.

How does a hreflang tag look

Let’s consider a Spanish-language version for your English-language homepage. Using hreflang Spanish attribute would tag it as “Espanol” with the tag “es” for searchers with an IP address of a Spanish-speaking country. This set of searchers will view it in Spanish instead of the English version of your homepage.

How to use hreflang

There are three different approaches to implementing hreflang tags. You can use any of the three below:

HTML

In this approach, you can link elements to the HTML <head> section to direct towards a particular language. 

For example: 

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://es.example.com/" />

HTTP header

Say you need to publish PDFs or any other type of non-HTML files. In this case, you can use the HTTP header to point to a different language version. Here’s how:

<http://es.example.com/>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="es",<http://de.example.com/>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="de"

XML Sitemap

Last but not the least on this list is using the help of XML sitemaps. An alternate method to the previous two, in this approach, you can submit a language version information in your website sitemap. Google uses this information to employ data to search engines that say that your English website has pages available in multiple languages worldwide. For example, your English website has versions adaptable to both German and Swiss-based German speakers.

NOTE:

1. No matter the approach, make sure to implement an hreflang tag on the absolute URLs of your web pages.
2. Hreflang tags are case insensitive. Although we use uppercase for country or region codes, it does not matter in the case of hreflang. Search engines will understand them anyway!
3. You can add hreflang attributes in any order. For example:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://yourwebsite.com/en" />
or
<link rel="alternate" href="https://yourwebsite.com/en" hreflang="en" /> 

would result in the same output.

Technicalities of Hreflang – Language-specific URLs

When it comes to discussing the technical aspects of hreflang attributes, the type of URL used is a crucial matter. It all narrows down to three options available:

• Subdomains (es.example.com)
• Subdirectories (example.com/es/)
• Country code top-level domains or ccTLD (example.es)

The answer to this debate is merely “it depends.” In terms of SEO, there are several factors to be considered before reaching a conclusion. Let’s understand better.

Subdomain

A subdomain is unique in every sense and is a part of a larger domain.

For instance, the blog page of your website would produce a URL that looks like this: blog.example.com

This is an example of a subdomain which is a part of a larger domain – the URL to your website. Subdomains define the URL for separate web pages of a website with unique content.

Subdomains are helpful in terms of the organization of content. With every piece of content with its own subdomain, it’s easier to maintain track of content separately from the rest of the pages of a large website. Search engines like Google view subdomains as separate pages. This means that a well-optimized subdomain will help your site pages rank higher in search results.

Subdirectory

A subdirectory is a folder within your website that consists of separate pages or pieces of content. Subdirectories can be used to create separate website sections with different content.

Users usually find subdirectories easier to understand compared to subdomains. It avoids confusion and traffic loss. For instance, if you type bizz.com, search results will automatically view your blog at bizz.com/blog. Additionally, authority can be passed from the root domain to subdirectories which helps in search engine visibility.

ccTLD

As the name suggests, a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is a distinct domain specific to a particular country. For example, if your business based in the UK has a website, the ccTLD for your site will be bestsales.uk.

ccTLDs are perfect for international web content. It makes a strong statement and also signals search engines that your website focuses on a specific country.

Subdomains vs. Subdirectories vs. Country code Top-Level Domains: Which should you use for SEO?

SEO experts generally prefer subdirectories over subdomains because they inherit the root domain's authority, helping them rank faster. Subdirectories benefit from existing backlinks and established SEO equity, making them more effective than subdomains in many cases.

Although Google recognizes the relationship between subdomains and the main domain, linking between them is often limited. As a result, subdomains require substantial external backlinks to build authority, which can take time.

For international content, ccTLDs are an option, but subdirectories or subdomains can be a cost-effective way to target users in different countries. So, the choice lies with you based on your needs and preferences.

SEO best practices for URL structures

To apply the best practices to meet the SEO algorithms of a multilingual website structure, the URL plays a vital role you cannot miss. Here are a few points to note when implementing measures to maximize search-engine referred traffic:

• Impactful domain names matter – Choose short, easy-to-remember domain names without numbers or unusual characters to enhance word-of-mouth advertising and search engine accessibility.
• Smart Keyword Integration - Include broad, relevant keywords in your domain name when possible, but avoid excessive keyword stuffing to prevent negative search engine biases.
• Minimize Hyphen Use - Limit hyphens in your domain name as they can reduce memorability and are often associated with spammy sites.
• Stick to .com TLDs - Opt for a .com top-level domain for better traffic and credibility, avoiding less familiar extensions like .biz or .info, which can seem untrustworthy.
• Use Subdirectories Over Subdomains - Place content like blogs in subdirectories rather than subdomains to benefit from the root domain's authority, unless creating language-specific sites.

On-Page SEO factors for Multilingual sites

Now that you have an understanding of the SEO best practices for multilingual SEO, it’s also important to understand the technicalities of on-page SEO for better optimization of multilingual sites.

• Localized Meta Titles, Descriptions, and Headings: Meta titles and descriptions are the first things users see on search engines. Ensure they’re localized for each language to improve click-through rates. Localizing headings also helps search engines and users understand the page's content.
• Alt Tags for Images in Different Languages: Alt tags not only make your images accessible but are also valuable for SEO. Each language version of your site should have image alt tags written in the corresponding language, as search engines use these tags to index image content.
• Internal Linking for Multilingual Content: Internal linking helps both users and search engines navigate your site. Ensure that links between language versions are set up correctly, and avoid broken or incorrect links between the different language sections of your site.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

• Not Prioritizing Local Content - Focusing only on translations without considering the local context can make your content irrelevant. Invest in localized content creation to provide valuable, engaging information that caters to the local audience’s needs.
• Misusing hreflang Tags - hreflang tags help search engines understand which language version of your content to show in different regions. Incorrectly implementing these tags can lead to ranking issues. Make sure your hreflang setup is accurate to prevent showing the wrong language version to users.
• Ignoring Regional Competitors - Ignoring local competitors can hurt your ranking. Research your competitors in each region to understand their strategies and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Using Automated Translations - While tempting, automated translations often miss cultural nuances, leading to poor user experiences. Human translation and localization are essential for delivering quality content that resonates with the local audience.

Final thoughts

Multilingual SEO is a powerful way to grow your online presence globally, but it requires careful planning and execution. By localizing content, addressing technical challenges, and avoiding common mistakes, you can create an effective SEO content strategy that drives traffic and engagement across regions.

Hreflang attributes, localization, and translation are closely related elements that together make up a robust content strategy for a multilingual site. In a world where content is key, now’s the time to leverage it for maximum reach, increasing visibility, and attracting higher traffic worldwide. If you're ready to amplify your multilingual strategy, explore how our Drupal SEO services can help you address these complexities and achieve impactful results.