Language and technical writing for Google (SEO)
It scares the living daylights out of you when you think about how much content you have created and put online in the past. And of course, all of that has to be available in the languages of the countries where you will be active, simply because your visitors will stay on the website longer and will get in touch with you more quickly. It also gives you confidence. You can choose to use 1 language, which would then be English, but as mentioned, this will not benefit the user experience.
By using a language per country, this also results in (a lot of) work. Having the content translated via a translation site such as Google Translate is not recommended. Often it deviates somewhat from how it is written in that country. I can imagine that you cannot do it all yourself because you simply do not speak the language, let alone write it. You will have to hire or hire people to translate that content in a natural and logical way.
If you use the right language per country, this also gives you the opportunity to work directly on the SEO part. Map out which words are used there and do keyword research to find out where the most search volume is. Incorporate that into your content to immediately take an important step in terms of findability in the search engines.
Besides the fact that a multilingual website must contain languages of the countries in which you are active, there is also a technical part. And that is important for a search engine like Google.
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What needs to be done is to add a small piece of code in the head (<head>) of the page, which is called hreflang. This attribute tells Google which language of the website it is and for which country it is intended.
In the previous examples above I assumed a Dutch, Belgian and German website. What do the hreflang codes look like for these languages?
It is important to implement all hreflang codes on a page. So in the case of the Dutch website, you also place that hreflang of Belgium and Germany.
Good to know is that the definitions of languages and countries are fixed with so-called ISO formats. For the language part these are ISO 639-1 formats, and for the country part these are ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 formats.
Quite a few choices
All in all, you have to make quite a few choices. They depend on the current situation (what kind of domain extension do you have, for example), but also what you want in the future. For example, think of complete freedom in building the website per country. Perhaps this article will raise more questions, but that doesn't have to be wrong. Because as I started the article, you want to make the most logical and optimal choice.
