Multilingual SEO for voice searches: Comprehensive guide

Google is now acknowledging 119 different languages on voice search. Which is great for user experience. It makes ranking a bit more challenging for site owners, particularly those who host multi-linguistic traffic. Site owners need to act to accommodate these people who are taking a various linguistic technique to browse. That’s where multilingual SEO can be found in, finished with voice search in mind.

Before we begin digging deeper into multilingual SEO for voice search, let us initially present the search of the future aka multilingual voice search.

What is Multilingual Voice Search?

With the advancement of innovation, search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex, and others work towards improving their user experience and making the search simpler than ever.

Staying up to date with these efforts, they now let individuals speak with them in their own language, understand it and yield the results they were looking for.

More than 23 percent of American families use digital assistants, and almost 27 percent of individuals conduct voice searches using smart devices. This number is anticipated to increase by more than 9 percent in 2021 alone.

This means, a growing number of individuals will converse with Google in languages aside from English. Like, a German native is likely to search for something by talking in German. A native Indian could utilize any of the 100+ languages spoken in India, and a United States national may utilize English, Spanish, or some other language.

This boost in the appeal of voice assistants, multilingual voice search inadvertently leads to an increase in the demand for multilingual SEO for voice search.

Do you need to optimize your website for multilingual searches? Yes. How else will your website reach your target audience that browses in their native language?

Combining Multilingual SEO with voice search

Up until now, there are guides just for either multilingual SEO or for voice search. However, assessing the rising significance of this fairly brand-new search, we provide you with a guide that combines voice search and multilingual SEO.

What is Multilingual SEO?

Multilingual SEO is a practice that adjusts your website to deal with your target market that utilizes multi-linguistic search. It includes translating the web page, using the ideal keywords, and optimizing the web page accordingly. We will enter into the details listed below.

Notice how Google yields Hindi results for a search performed in Urdu/Hindi. That’s since these results were optimized for multilingual voice searches.

Voice search: The search of the future

Voice searches are hugely different from routine typing searches. When typing, you want to do minimum physical effort, that is typing, and get results. Anyway, when speaking, you are not doing any physical effort and simply talking. Voice searches tend to be longer and have a more conversational style and tone.

Let’s take an example

An individual trying to find a Chinese restaurant will set about it in two different methods when using voice search and regular search.

When typing, this person will type something like “finest Chinese restaurant near me.”

On the other hand, when using voice search, she or he will just say “Hey Google, tell me about the best Chinese restaurants I can go to today.”

Do you see the distinction? To enhance for voice assistants, you need to adjust to this distinction when doing SEO.

Adding the multilingual touch to this and you’ll have a multilingual voice search.

From the example above, I looked for the weather in my city.

If I were typing, I merely would’ve typed” [my city name] weather condition.”

When using voice, I utilized a total expression in my native language, and google yielded results in that language. These results revealed that they were optimized for multilingual voice searches.

How to Do Multilingual SEO for Voice Searches?

Now, if you wish to accommodate a global audience and expand your reach. And you want your website to rank when your target market searches for something you offer, in their own language, you require multilingual SEO.

Listed below we are talking about some steps to optimizing your website for multilingual searches:

Keyword Research

No SEO strategy can ever start without keyword research. Prior to you start doing multilingual SEO for your website, you require to carry out correct keyword research.

When equating your website, you can’t simply equate the phrases or keywords. Since a keyword that has high search volume in one language might not be that feasible when translated in another language.

Let’s take a look at a case study from Ahrefs to understand this point.

Ahrefs looked at the search volume for the essential expression “eleventh hour vacations.” They found out it got 117k searches from the UK in a month.

Nevertheless, the very same expression equated into French” Vacances dernière minute.” Had a total search volume of 8.4 k.

The findings from this case study go to show the importance of independent keyword research study for multilingual SEO. Since merely equating the keywords will not yield great outcomes. What you can do is select up the expressions from your initial

website, which we assume is in English and is optimized for voice search. Translate them. Brainstorm extra pertinent keywords and plug them into any of the keyword research study tools to see their search volume and competition. Additionally, keywords for voice searches are different from routine keywords as you need to take an instinctive approach by getting to your target audience’s mind to see what they think and speak when browsing. And how they do it. Use these phrases to go ahead with your keyword search and make a list based on

high search volume and low competitionCompetitors Translation As soon as you have a list of keywords you want to enhance, the next action is to equate the content that’s currently there on your website and enhance it with the keywords. When

translating a site, the best technique is to hire a human translator who is a native speaker of the target language.

You may be tempted to utilize Google Translate or some other automated translation tools. Even though Google backs its translators, it leaves a subtle recommendation on utilizing human translators. Due to the fact that robotics are yet to come as far as completing and beating people. A minimum of when it comes to translations.

Additionally, make certain the translator aligns the content with the tone of your original site. Hreflang Annotation Here comes the technical part. Did you actually think you can get by multilingual SEO without getting associated with the technicalities? Hreflang annotation is crucial for sites that have different versions in different languages for different searches.

It allows Google to determine which websites to show to which visitor. You do not desire your English visitors to land on the French variation of your page. Using Hreflang will enable you to receive English visitors on the English page, and French-speaking individuals on the page in French.

Another essential quality that will go in your site’s code when doing multilingual SEO is the alternate attribute. It informs the online search engine that an equated page is a different version, in an alternate language, of a pre-existing page and not a replicate. Since Google cracks down on duplicate pages and can punish your site if you have not utilized the alternate tag.

URL structure

You can’t go over multilingual SEO, without speaking about URL structure.

When doing multilingual SEO, you are typically saving various versions of your website under the very same domain. This means, you have to produce a URL structure for each version, so the search engine can take the visitor to the ideal page.

When it comes to URLs for multilingual websites, you have many options, and each choice has its cons and pros. You can take a look at how Google lists these benefits and drawbacks in the image below.

Source: Google Search Central Confused about which URL structure to use? You can choose any option according to your choices. According to Google, no URL structure has a special influence on SEO other than using parameters within URLs. I personally believe utilizing a sub-domain as Wikipedia or Sub-folder/directory as Apple, are the easiest choices to create a multilingual site. However if you’re using WordPress then you can use a plugin like Polylang to multi-lingual.

Material style

The content composing design is quite important when optimizing your website for multilingual SEO. your material should be more focused on conversational style rather than academic or complex sentence structures. As stated, voice-related questions are primarily in questions format, so frequently asked questions, short paragraphs with more emphasis on attending to concerns will be better for voice-related search inquiries.

The importance of multilingual SEO for Voice Search

Now that you know how to set your site for multilingual SEO, you may be wondering whether it deserves all the inconvenience.

If your site sees a lot of multilingual traffic, you have no other option than to choose multilingual SEO for voice search because,

1. Voice search is the future of search 51 percent of people already use it for product research study prior to purchasing. Therefore, starting with multilingual voice search today will prepare you to tackle the difficulties of search and SEO that the future brings.
2. Your company can’t grow all that much unless it personalizes its offerings to the visitor. In this case, speaking to them in their own language amounts to a good user experience.
3. Multilingual SEO will expand your website’s reach by accommodating multi-linguistic searchers. If your organization is international or infected numerous countries with various languages, and your website is limited to just English, I bet you must be missing a big portion of easy traffic. Which would be hard with English keywords with higher competitors globally and keywords difficulty.

Last ideas

Multilingual SEO for voice search is something that you’ll see all website owners (who receive multilinguistic traffic) performing in the future. Therefore, it is much better to start now and get ahead of your rivals.

The key takeaways for optimizing your website for multilingual voice searches are target language keyword search, human translation, hreflang tags, and the ideal URL structure.

With the best keyword research study, a significant translation, thorough technical SEO, and by using the URL structure that fits best with your unique web requirements, you can enjoy riding the wave of multilingual voice search when it shows up, and it will get here soon.

Atul Jindal is Sr. Web Engineer at Adobe Research.