WordPress powers almost 43% of all websites and not all of them are in English. In fact, the number of non-English websites is on the rise, with 56% of WordPress sites being created in languages other than U.S. English. This shows there’s a huge opportunity for going multilingual and translating your site in multiple languages.
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But getting started can be confusing, even for experienced WordPress users. You might be wondering what are the best WordPress multilingual plugins? What are the technical challenges of setting it up a multi language website? Are there any SEO implications? Should I use machine or human translations?
By Rae Morey – You’ll find this article in its entirety HERE on Translate Press’s website.
In this post, I’ll guide you through what you need to know about translating your WordPress site and hopefully answer all your questions. We’ll cover everything from figuring out whether you need to translate your site in other languages, different methods and WordPress plugins for translation, and the best ways to translate your content.
Do You Need to Translate Your WordPress Website?
Translating your WordPress content isn’t something you do for fun—it’s something you do with a strategy in mind. So if you’re wondering if you need a multilingual site, it’s best to start by checking if you’re already getting international traffic.
The easiest way to do this is with Google Analytics. To check what languages your visitors have set their browsers to, go to Reports > Audience > Geo > Language.
It helps to compare this data with your visitors’ locations, which you’ll find at Reports > Audience > Geo > Location.
So what does all this data mean? You can draw a few conclusions:
- Most visitors browse this site in English.
- People from India are not browsing in their native languages, but maybe they would like to.
- Visitors from Spain, France and China are browsing in their respective languages and might feel more comfortable accessing the site in Spanish, French and Simplified Chinese.
The bottom line is there are opportunities for translating this site into other languages, including Hindi, Spanish, French and Chinese.
Benefits of Translating WordPress Site
Translating WordPress doesn’t just benefit your visitors, it offers many advantages for your business, too. If you’re doing well locally and nationally, it might be time to think about expanding into other countries. Scaling your business is as good a reason to consider translating your content.
1. Boost Your SEO
One of the biggest advantages of having additional languages is the boost you’ll get in traffic.
Say, for example, you translate your content into Spanish and French. The next time Google crawls your site, it will recognize your new languages as separate content to your English pages. This means your site will appear in English, Spanish, and French search results.
Additionally, while the competition for English language SERPs is fierce, you might find it’s easier to rank for your keywords in other languages.
For example, the keyword phrase ‘translation plugins’ is competitive, as you can see in the KWFinder results below:
If you search for the same keywords in Spanish, it’s suddenly much easier to rank:
And a search for ‘plugins de traduction’ in French shows there’s even more potential for ranking highly in SERPs.
Creating a multilingual WordPress site, together with a well-thought out international keyword strategy, can help you target a broader range of keywords. This will increase your chances of ranking on the first page of search results for more than one language.
2. Improve User Experience
When you go online, you probably take it for granted that you can browse in your native language, right? For much of the non-English speaking world, this isn’t the case.
Translating WordPress instantly improves the user experience for visitors who speak other languages. Not only will they be able to understand your content, but they’ll feel welcome and want to keep browsing. This will have a flow on effect across your site, increasing traffic, reducing your bounce rate, and boosting conversions.
3. Build Trust and Credibility
It’s important for businesses to speak the same languages as their target markets. Why? Because people feel more comfortable conversing in their native language as it’s the culture they’ve been brought up in.
Having a fully translated website can help establish your business as a credible offering in your target markets. Quality multilingual content will also…
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