We all know that Google has its own algorithm in calculating website ranking for its search result. 

Keyword, links, website structure and other factors all constituted the foundation of the precise calculation. But things have changed radically since Google announced to increase heavily the weight of content quality in calculating ranks in 2016, as the search engine giant redefined its position to a more user-centric information provider.

For the perspective of better ranking, the move would encourage businesses to write more quality blog articles on their websites, and for Google, better articles would let users to spend more time on the search engine. 

This policy has been working very well. According to Google’s recent research, since the introduction of this policy, users have been spending 2.3 seconds more in average on webpages that has undergone renovation by providing more information, and the number of websites with more than 150 pages has increased drastically from 0.3% in 2014 to 7.3% in 2018.

That means companies are investing more and more on writing good contents for the purpose of retaining readers’ attention and compete for higher rank on Google.

Quality Website Translation Means Higher Rank on Google

Because of the yielding results, Google wanted to go further.

From the research released during the Online Search Summit 2019, engineers found that the definition of “QUALITY” regarding content and information has changed in terms of algorithmic scoring and weighting. Since Google wanted to improve the ability of its search engine in understanding languages, and to tackle the problem of overwhelming of auto-generated contents that are produced by machines, it increased the scoring of quality translation in March 2019.

Contents translated by machines will now score much lower or even facing penalty. In contrast, quality contents translated or written by human will now benefit from higher score.

So, does it mean that simply translating a website would help website to rank higher?

When speaking of multilingual website development, there are still other aspects that we have to look into. Here are the factors:

Translation vs Localisation

When we say translation it doesn’t simply mean to convert a word to a foreign meaning of that word. You have to look into the context as well as the cultural meaning of the whole passage.

Take this sentence for example: To ensure no or minimal coverage shortfall for our clients.

In insurance, the term “Shortfall” here means “Lack of or insufficient Protection” in English, but if translated literally into Chinese, the word will become no meaning or the sentence would not be culturally readable. 

The direction of describing the situation should be altered and detailed explanation should be given. So the sentence should be localised to: “確保客人不存在不承保問題，及能夠享用到最高保額待遇” (Back translation: To ensure the disability of providing protection would not happen among our clients, and to ensure that they can enjoy the highest insured amount).

Translation vs Copywriting / Article Write up

The cost of translating a piece of article is much lower than that of writing up a new one. But from the perspective of marketing approach, translated articles do not always work for your target audience, and you will always need to put yourself in their’s shoes.

For example, Elon Musk is quite famous in the US and everyone knows about him. But this is not the case in China. Chinese people seldom heard about him because Paypal is not commonly used and Tesla is not that famous in China. In contrast, Ma Yun is the one they talk about everyday. So, if you want your article to fit in your target audience’s taste, you may have to reference to related information and rewrite new ones whose contents are culturally fitted in the market.

*Click to know more about our translation service and copywriting service.

Multilingual Keyword Positioning

As mentioned, content is not just paragraphs and phrases. They are pieces of cultural thoughts. This logic applies to SEO and Keyword tactics as well.

For example, a UK financial company wanted to find more Chinese customers. The keywords they have been working on in the UK are “Financial Company”, “Stock” and “Wealth Management”, and they literally translated them into “金融公司”, “股票” and “财富管理” for their Chinese keyword SEO plan.

This will not work effectively because Mainland Chinese tend to search with PinYin (Chinese alphabet). So,“Jīnróng gōngsī”, “Gǔpiào” and “Cáifù guǎnlǐ” would work better for them.

Origin of Links

Links from notable webpages would increase local authoritativeness of a landing page. So when you are making plans for link engineering, you should also take local factors into account.

Spear’s Website Translation and Copywriting Services

Spear is the largest linguistic company in Asia but we are more than that.

We are a cross-culture marketing expert. We have helped thousands of MNCs to expand their businesses overseas by helping to translate and localise their websites and marketing materials. We also offer Search Engine Optimisation and articles write up service to retain the competitiveness of their online presence.

Talk to our local team to know more how we can help generate business for you.