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One of my UK clients recently received a link to a company that offers ‘multilingual SEO services’ - they build ‘optimised’ (and I use the term loosely!) landing pages in multiple languages.This led my client to ask me if I thought it was worth them shelling out some cash. My answer seemed like it should be posted on here for wider reference in case this ever comes up for you too, in SEO or PPC promotions…

All of my experience in this ‘international’ area has lead me to conclude that in the majority of cases if somebody visits your site via a native language search result (say through a French language Pay Per Click ad) but then has to use English in order to use the main bulk of your website, they don’t do so. So even if you had individual language specific pages, I’m not sure they’d be of much use beyond the landing page itself.

For PPC campaigns this always means lower conversions and poor RoI stats - I’ve seen this happen time and time again. Look at it from your own perspective… you see a link to ‘book a holiday in Tuscany’ and when you get there the website’s main functionality is in Italian.

There’s a lot more to search optimisation than a bit of text and some meta tags (as referenced in the presentation of this particular ‘SEO’ company) - all the same search algorithm priniciples occur in any language of Google- country specific IP, genuine content, links from geo-releveant websites etc.

So the moral of the story is, if you want to attract overseas customers in a language different to that which your website is built for, you better invest properly in an exercise to make the site fully navigable. User experience is everything, whether you’re English, Japanese or Klingon.

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