Hey, I’m super happy to see you again. 🦦
If you’re reading this, it means you’re interested in the best way to translate your articles or website while following SEO best practices. And you’re absolutely right.
Translating your content is an excellent SEO strategy, but you have to know how to do it correctly—otherwise, you might end up with the opposite effect. 🥶 In this guide, I’ll share my best practices for SEO translation and, most importantly, the mistakes to avoid.
Ready to get started? 🦦
Why translate your website?
Well, because it’s a great strategy for generating more traffic—and especially more organic traffic. Translating your website can help you
- Enter a less competitive market (and therefore rank higher),
- Build a customer base in another country,
- Drastically increase your SEO traffic.
In most cases, this is an excellent strategy because it allows you to quickly rank for SEO keywords that will bring you business in a less competitive market.
💡 When I implemented this for a client, we realized a few things: that there was a real market to tap into in Spain, and that very few of their competitors were offering content in Spanish.
By translating their website and articles, we ranked very quickly (in less than a month) for keywords that brought in a lot—and I mean a lot—of business.
All of this client’s revenue comes from their translated pages and articles. It takes them no more than 2 hours per week, since they translate the pages and articles they produce in French.
6 Best Practices for Translating an SEO Article
1. Translate your pages
If you decide to get started with SEO translation, I recommend translating at least two pages:
- Your homepage,
- Your legal notices.
This is the bare minimum to get started if you’d rather focus on t ranslating articles. After all, your users still need to be able to navigate your site and access a homepage.
2. Translate your articles
This is THE key to generating SEO traffic in another language. If you have a lot of articles, I recommend two approaches:
- Translate everything at once and then schedule publication at a regular pace (two translated articles per week, for example),
- Translate little by little, but always at a steady pace.
What Google hates most of all is the “sudden” publication of content. For example, it hates it when there are spikes in publishing activity. You could be flagged as a spam site and get penalized. It’s much safer (and, above all, more effective) to publish your SEO content at a steady pace.
I recommend publishing at least one piece of SEO content per week to see results.
3. Optimize Your URL (Slug) for SEO
Optimizing your URLs’ slugs (or permalinks) for SEO is important for several reasons:
1. Improved readability and understanding
When slugs are translated into the target language, they become easier for users to understand. A readable and relevant URL is more appealing and intuitive, which can encourage users to click on your link. 🔗
2. Better chances of ranking
Search engines, such as Google, take keywords in URLs into account. Having slugs that are translated and optimized for keywords can improve your ranking. For example, a French URL for a French-speaking audience is more likely to rank well in French search results, and a Spanish URL for a Spanish-speaking audience is more likely to rank well.
One country = one language = one URL!
You should always include your keyword in your URL to increase your chances of ranking well.
3. Improved User Experience
Translated and relevant slugs improve the user experience by making URLs consistent with the page’s content and the user’s language. This builds user trust and enhances their navigation on your site. 😁
4. Translate Your Alt Tags
This is an often-overlooked aspect, and we don’t think about it very often. But it’s actually essential. An alt tag, or alt attribute, is alternative text added to images in a web page’s HTML code. It describes the image’s content in a few words or sentences.
This helps describe your image to Google. Think of Google as being “blind”—it can’t see your image, but it can read its description to understand what it is. A good alt tag can help you rank in Google Images. 👀
Our tool, “Traduire Sans Migraine,” will automatically translate your alt text into the correct language so you don’t have to do it manually. You can try the tool here.
5. Translate Your Target Query
This is what lets you say, “I’m prioritizing THIS keyword”—I’m looking to rank my content for THIS keyword. So you need to check a few things:
- That your target query is correctly translated,
- That the chosen translated keyword has sufficient search volume.
Let me explain: when you translate your keyword, you need to check whether that specific keyword is actually being searched for. It’s very simple—you can quickly check the search volume using any SEO tool:
I’ll look up its Spanish translation and see which keyword to choose:
Your target keyword is accessible via Yoast SEO or Rank Math if you’re using WordPress.
6. Translate Your SEO Meta Tags
It’s essential—and above all, mandatory—to translate your SEO meta tags. No matter which tool you choose, you must be able to translate your meta title, meta description, and target query.
That way, when your site appears in search results, it will be in the right language and users will click on it! (And, most importantly, so that Google understands you’re trying to rank in that language.)
7. Translate your internal links
Your internal links (when you link to another of YOUR pages or YOUR articles) must be in the same language as your article. You can’t write an article in Spanish and send your user to a French article for two reasons:
- It’s a very bad practice and a poor user experience.
- Internal links are very powerful for SEO; they allow your pages to boost each other’s rankings. But if you do something illogical (like linking from an English page to a French one), you’ll have the opposite effect.
Where should you start when translating your site?
To start, I took my 10 best French articles and applied the same technique:
I started by translating using Traduire Sans Migraine. Then, I checked the target search query in that language on Semrush or Ubersuggest to see if there was actual search volume or if, in that language, people used a different term than the literal translation.
💡 Example: I had translated “prospection LinkedIn” as “LinkedIn prospecting,” but Americans are more likely to search for “LinkedIn outreach tool.” The tool already translates my internal links, so I don’t need to spend 5 hours on this step. 😁
I implemented solid SEO optimization (internal and external links, bolded keywords, and repetitions of the keyword and its variations).
I checked the search intent in the target language to tailor my article or page accordingly. Then I scheduled 1 to 10 translations per week—for at least 2 months.
Finally, I analyzed my results. To do this, I use the following data: monthly SEO visitor growth, which I compare to the previous month. 💊
Here’s an example from a client’s site: I started translating in December 2022 and began analyzing the results in January 2023. 😁
I didn’t do anything extra besides translating through Traduire Sans Migraine and scheduling the articles.
What You Absolutely Must Check After Your Translation
- Have you checked the translation of the keyword?
- Does this translation have search volume? (Check using an SEO tool like Ubersuggest or Semrush)
- Did you properly optimize your article for SEO?
- Did you properly check the search intent? (I recommend using a VPN to make sure the results are realistic.)
- Does your article include relevant internal links?
With these few questions, you’ll know what you still need to do to optimize your article for SEO and get the best results. 🤩
Frequently Asked Questions About SEO Translation 💊
Can I publish all my translations at once?
I recommend scheduling the publication of your translations and not doing a
“ ” in bulk. Google hates “ spikes ” in sudden posts—it might think you’re spamming. I recommend publishing a few every day rather than all on the same day!How do I check my keyword’s search volume?
Use a tool like Ubersuggest or SemRush to check your search volume:
How do I access the “Traduire Sans Migraine” tool?
“Traduire Sans Migraine” no longer exists. But don’t panic! It’s now fully integrated into “Write Without a Headache.” 👀 So you can translate your content directly from our new tool, with greater reliability and stability.
Have a question? Feel free to message me on the chat so I can help you out.
All the best. 🦦
