Dual-wield translation and SEO to maximise results

Maria says: “In your international SEO efforts, do not think of translation and SEO as separate tasks performed by separate professionals.

Only dual-wielding professionals can apply both skill sets simultaneously to maximise your results.”

Why do translation and SEO need to be the same task?

“Only by integrating them can you achieve what you’re setting out to achieve in your international SEO campaigns.

You want your content to resonate with local audiences in every market that you try to penetrate, and you want to take into account how people search in each market, which is heavily culturally coded.

If you have a team of SEOs who do not understand the nuances of translation, localisation, and the impact of culture on search behaviour, and you have a translation team that doesn’t understand the basic principles of SEO, you will have a very disjointed approach to international SEO that will cost you dearly further down the line – not just in terms of budget, but in terms of all sorts of resources.

There will be a misalignment and a mutual undoing of effort between the SEO team and the translation team. There are conflicts, there’s friction, and there’s unnecessary back and forth because each party is focusing on what they know how to do best without considering that the other team has crucial input to bring to the table.

Translation that is done without sufficient consideration of SEO, and SEOs that do not take culture into account, will lead to either very well-optimized content that’s ineffective, or to linguistically accurate content that doesn’t bring conversions and traffic, and doesn’t do what it’s supposed to be doing from an SEO perspective.”

Is it more important to create something appropriate for the language and culture of the market that you’re trying to compete in, rather than a simple translation?

“Exactly. There seems to be a misconception that international SEO and SEO translation are all about translating keywords, and that’s it. In reality, it goes so far beyond that.

SEO translation is a misnomer. We should call it SEO localisation because you’re working with more than just translating words. You’re considering cultural differences and local search habits because you want the content to resonate with the target audience.

Currently, a lot of SEO translation efforts consist of literal translations of lists of keywords that have been taken from domestic SEO research and then inserting them into translations without thinking that you might need a different keyword altogether, or a different angle to the text. You sometimes need to get rid of whole sections and rewrite others.

For example, if you sell pest control products, each region is going to search for your product using the name of whatever creature is bothering them in their area. Pests are not the same across regions, so they will not be searching in the same way, and you need to consider that.

The same is true with women’s clothing. People in a country where they dress very modestly are not going to be looking for micro bikinis. You need to consider culture to see what terms they’re using and how they’re trying to find the content that you’re trying to offer to them.”

Does this apply across many different business types or are there certain industries where it is more of an acute issue?

“I’ve seen it happen everywhere – across industries and across company sizes. In my opinion, it stems from these businesses, and there are some key reasons behind it.

The main reason is that these companies tend to lack localisation maturity internally, and they’re not very aware of what international SEO entails. So, they choose to outsource to a translation agency that claims to know how to do multilingual SEO, SEO localisation, etc.

However, these agencies are not actual specialists, a lot of the time. They are mis-selling the service as an add-on to a core translation service instead of as an integrated approach, and they fail to hire the right professionals who have both skill sets. Therefore, they’re providing inaccurate and incomplete advice, and businesses do not know any better.

This all results in allocating insufficient budget to the whole effort. This, in turn, leads to a very flawed workflow where SEO is pushed into a traditional translation workflow, and that just doesn’t work. You need your own custom SEO localisation workflow to get the results that you’re after.”

In an ideal world, should you be looking for an SEO who is based in the market that you’re targeting?

“Ideally you want to begin with linguists who are properly trained in SEO beyond how to do multilingual keyword research. You want linguists who know about technical SEO, who know about user experience, and who know a lot about SEO in general.

Then, you want SEOs who are bilingual, and you want them to work together with the linguists. If you can find a linguist who is also an SEO, you have struck gold, but that is very rare. There are not many out there.

It’s different skill sets. It’s creative with technical, which is very difficult to find, but it’s not impossible. If you can’t find them, then you want a team where your SEO is bilingual and based in that market, you want your linguist to have sufficient SEO training, and you want them working collaboratively.”

What aspects of SEO do translation specialists commonly miss out on?

“Everything from user experience considerations to how to make text skimmable to how to properly localise meta titles, meta descriptions, hreflang tags, alt text, and various technical SEO elements which might mean they should approach the translation of the text differently.

If a section of the original text is too long, for example, and it’s not broken up into sufficient subheadings, and they don’t know how to improve that in their translation, then that quality error will be carried over into the target language. That’s very typical.

There are many linguists who claim to be specialised in SEO, and they aren’t. They can find equivalents for keywords when they receive a list of keywords, but that’s not enough.

I’ve been asked to review these lists many times and they cannot spot when two seemingly different keywords are actually variants of the same one. They end up with two pages that are optimized around what is essentially the same primary keyword (which is cannibalisation, at the end of the day), just because there’s an extra preposition in one of them.

There’s no knowledge of semantic search. There’s no knowledge of all the improvements that Google has been making over the years to make SEO more about meaning than about keywords.”

Do you need someone on the ground, or could you have an article translated relatively cheaply and then find someone in the region to check the translations?

“That’s wasted resources. You’re going to end up spending double because whoever’s reviewing will want to redo the work based on what they consider to be important according to their skill set. That’s likely to be met with some resistance from the person who did the translation originally.

With this back and forth and this friction, it can be hard to know whose voice to trust. It’s better to leave it in the hands of someone who can do it all, or in the hands of a team who can combine their skills to produce a final product.

Trying to cut corners always ends up in wasted resources and time.”

Do you also keep local search engines and algorithms in mind when optimizing for a local audience?

“When I mentioned the flawed workflow that translation agencies tend to follow, the main element missing from such workflow is a lack of strategy.

You cannot begin this work without a proper international SEO strategy, and that involves consideration for lots of things. It’s not just local search engines, but also local UX. UX is heavily culturalised, with usability conventions, design elements, fonts, colours, how users interact with a page, and where they expect to find the CTA button.

Even the internet access in the region will have an impact. How fast is your page going to load in Cuba compared to other countries? Are you going to run any local activation campaigns as well?

It is so much more than just optimizing for Google, Baidu, or Yandex. It’s several factors, and they all need to go within an ISEO strategy, with a sub-strategy for each local market that you’re aiming for.”

What key metrics do you need to keep an eye on to determine whether or not your localisation efforts have been successful?

“You should be tracking the same KPIs that you’re using for your domestic SEO, but you want to make sure that your translated content is resonating locally.

Is it eliciting the right emotions that will lead to a conversion? The thing with emotions is that they are culturally coded. How do you know that those emotions are getting elicited and that your content is engaging?

Several KPIs will point to that, such as time on site, bounce rates, engagement, and the click-through rate – not just impressions or position tracking, but how the users are responding to that.

If you see those metrics starting to drop or starting to do better, that tends to be a reflection of how well localised your content is.”

Does AI mean that all this localisation work could become unnecessary in a couple of years?

“AI works with words and humans work with so much more than words. We work with cultural knowledge, concepts, critical thinking, and realising that a certain way of wording a product’s features is not going to fly with a local audience.

AI is a tool. We all use it. If you’ve got an expert using AI, then it’s an incredible tool, but AI will not do this by itself.

Even if we assume that, in a hypothetical world, AI were good enough to replace us, the models are much better trained in English than they are in many other languages. AI really underperforms in minority languages – and even in Spanish, which is my native language. Spanish is a majority language and AI is still not as good in Spanish as it is in English.

There’s a long way to go before we need to worry about AI replacing us, and before clients can get hopeful about it.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Find an agency to outsource to that is truly specialised in both SEO and linguistics and localisation. Leave it all in their hands.

First, however, you need to make sure that they are following the right workflow, which includes strategy, technical SEO, and people with both skill sets working collaboratively. If you know that they’re doing that, you can just leave it all in their hands, and they will be saving you resources and time.

You want a cost-effective and efficient process – and that’s the only way to achieve it, unless you’ve got the capacity and the time to be doing it yourself.”

Maria Scheibengraf is a Spanish Marketing Translator and iSEO specialist at Crisol Translation Services, and you can find her over at CrisolTranslations.com.