For any business organization hoping to expand its reach to foreign markets in the near future, building a multilingual website is the most important task required to gain market awareness of its services, products and brands. To extend your market reach to international markets, it is important that your website speaks more languages. Therefore, turning your website into a multilingual or multiregional site is the first step towards success.

Why should you make a multilingual website?

English is considered a universal language and is understood by people all over the world. But what business owners don’t know is that buyers or customers often appreciate a website that offers content in their own language. Research has indicated that people are more likely to buy from a site that speaks their own language. They also find that they stay longer on a site that offers content in their native language. Even search engines prefer multilingual websites if you plan to target a global audience.

How to optimize your multilingual website?

Structure URLs for a global audience: Search engines and users often prefer the URL structure of the pages they visit and make decisions and judgments about the relevance of the site. URLs play a vital role in the user experience and can give you more information. For search engines, the URL is the unique identifier that is used to catalog the page and is also considered as one of the most important elements of international SEO.

Domain names: Once you have decided on the destination countries, it is important to do some research on the legal requirements for the website. These requirements specify your eligibility to use country-specific domain names. Developing multilingual websites should always factor in, as Google differentiates between domain name types.

• gTLDs: These domain names are not country specific and your multilingual development agency may consider gTLDs like .eu or .asia because they are region specific and not country specific. These types of domain names are easy to set up and allow for different server locations. Geo-targeting can be easily done using webmaster tools.

•ccTLD: These domains are more specific to each country, for example, .au means Australia, .de for Germany, etc. Choosing such domains shows that your website is targeted at a specific country. Easy site separation and clear geotargeting are easy, regardless of server location. However, this is usually more expensive and requires more infrastructure.

Avoid duplicate content: Websites that offer content for different regions and languages ​​typically create content that is the same or similar and is available at different URLs. For greater visibility of your multilingual website, it is recommended that you provide unique content for each user group. But this can sometimes be difficult and there is no need to hide duplicate content from being crawled by bots. Instead, you should choose a preferred version and redirect accordingly.

Multilingual website development can surely help you expand your market base, if you consider the above tips.