Essential Steps for a Multilingual Blog

An attractive, high-quality and multichannel online presence is key to the international growth of our company.

Content marketing allows you to generate more leads than search engine marketing and blogging is one of the main tools content marketing can count on.

However, in the vast majority of cases,a multilingual blog does not mean translating existing entries.

The Blog’s SEO Strategy

As with our website we have to carefully select the keywords that will allow the blog’s content to be found through search engines. In addition, we must take into account that the same content may not be suitable for all markets or countries.

Successful content strategies depend on having a deep understanding of your audience and their context. So, does this mean that I should have a different content strategy for every market or country? Not necessarily. In fact, most companies reuse the same content translating it and publishing it again on different websites. However, we must make sure we know enough about the target market’s reality so as to know which blog entry can be translated, if it needs to be adapted and which entries are simply not appropriate.

Distribution Channels

Content distribution is the most important step in achieving a successful content marketing strategy. There is no use creating a lot of content if it is not visible. And we can’t leave it up to the search engines to maximize its outreach!

E-mail and social networks are two important channels we can use to make our audience aware of our business. But, with multilingual content, it will often be difficult to publish these entries on the same channels that we already use. The answer to this is to create different profiles and e-mailing strategies based on the target markets or countries.

In addition to studying the keywords for our blog, we must also think of the URLs. It may be the case for example that Google thinks we are duplicating the content from our site. Duplication of content can affect the inclusion of our website in the search results.

A solution to this problem may be to create dedicated URLs for each different version of our website, either through a subdomain or a subdirectory.

Another aspect to take into account is which content management system you are using. If for example, on WordPress you decide to use subdirectories for each website or blog version, you can utilise plugins like TranslatePress or Polylang.