I am just back from the International Search Summit in Barcelona, learning about how multinational brands go about globalisation, localisation, translation, multilingual SEO and many other juicy topics. You might be asking what relevance this has for smaller budgets like yours. Well, my aim is is to understand what is possible, where best practice is at, and were opportunities lie. I can then pick out those solutions that will suit my clients who are smaller companies, and typically manufacturers, niche brand owners, and/or technical companies.

The summit included many clever people from companies like Rakuten, Google, Al Jazeera, Yandex, and marketplace specialist Adevinta – with localisation examples from Skyscanner and Vistaprint.

Many of the things I have told you all during Reviews over the last 20 years are still valid. Some need updating, namely:

·      Machine translation is getting really, really good especially when combined with smart internal collaboration between marketing, translation and technical SEO teams. However, for small budgets and teams it is still a long way off being able to generate the right impression for your specialist product information or company brand integrity. Use professional translators working into their native language.

·      We have long been talking about answering visitor questions in order to attract visitors in the first place (e.g. FAQs). Now a way to get a quick win is to offer People Also Asked (PAAs). So, after explaining for instance ‘How to change a lamp’ you might offer a PAA called ‘how long do different types and sizes of lamp last?’

·       A key thing to remember for SEO specialists, translators, and marketing agencies helping smaller companies is to create a team approach to multilingual SEO. So rather than sending back and forth CSV files that have no context or dictating to translators which terms will be keywords to translate into the target language try asking the translator to research your market and suggest a trans-creation of the content that makes it suitable for your target audiences.

·      Domain names are increasingly unimportant for SEO. If you have good, fresh content that is well optimised it will be found wherever it is sitting.   Having said that, it is still often best to have your site on a non-geographic top-level domain like a .com for future proofing and ease of implementing different strategies. See Google for a refresher on this topic.

·      Google Trends – News sites such as Al Jazeera use google trends to choose the title to apply to the article on a particular news event. This gives them up to the minute information about what people are actually searching for. You can use this to check out big trends, compare competitor brand names, look out for the next Big Thing, etc.

·      When you add foreign language content to your website, remember to tell Google about different language versions of the same page by using hreflang.

·      Alt tags and file names on your photos, graphics, etc. help Google to index your images. Remember to translate these web assets at the same time as the on-page text. (I gather that if your images are not well tagged, then Google might draw in someone else’s well tagged image alongside your text!)

·      Voice search is increasingly important. To help your content be found by voice searches you can create a featured snippet (this is the text that Google calls up in answer to a particular query, such as ‘How to change a lamp’). The answer needs to be concise and to the point. More advice about attracting voice search here.

·      Good featured snippets often get viewed, but do not necessarily attract click throughs. This is because viewers get the answer to their question in the snippet itself. If your strategy is brand-recognition then this is good. If your aim is sales, you need to change your snippet to make it more clickable – for instance making it a featured list snippet (with more than 8 points so that Google suggests ‘read more’ to view the 9th). If this article is on my website, then this is the ninth snippet and will be your reward for clicking through!

Thanks for some great sessions to Gabriele Kahlout from Al Jazeera; Fernando Angulo, SemRush; Esteve Castells, Adevinta; and Chris Silver Smith, Argent Media. Also thanks to the organisers at WebCertain.