Technical SEO
Multilingual SEO
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What is Multilingual SEO?
Multilingual SEO is optimising a website that publishes content in more than one language so that each language version can be found by people searching in that language. It goes beyond translation: each language needs its own keyword research, because people in different languages search with different words, phrasings and levels of detail.
The technical side is consistent: give every language version its own URL, mark the page language, connect equivalent pages with hreflang and avoid automatically redirecting visitors based on browser language, which can stop search engines from seeing the other versions. The content side is where most of the value lies: local vocabulary, examples, prices and sources.
Why it matters for SEO
A word-for-word translation of an English page often targets queries nobody types in the other language, and machine-translated pages without review can read poorly enough to hurt trust. Treating each language as its own market with its own keywords is what turns a translated site into one that earns search traffic in every language.
Example
A Kuala Lumpur tuition centre translates its English article "how to choose a tuition centre" into Chinese and gets no traffic. Looking at the live Chinese results, it finds parents search for terms like 补习中心 推荐 (tuition centre recommendations) together with their area. It rewrites the Chinese page around those terms, uses Malaysian examples and links the two versions with hreflang.
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