30-second summary:
- Search engines are laser-focused on improving user experience, and voice search plays an increasingly crucial role
- With 100+ global languages, people are prone to searching in their native language
- How do you optimize your website for multilingual search while keeping a natural and conversational tone?
- Atul Jindal accurately guides you through the process.
Google now recognizes 119 languages on voice search, which is great for user experience. But it makes ranking a bit more challenging for website owners, especially those who host multi-linguistic traffic. Website owners must act to cater to people taking a different linguistic approach to search. That’s where multilingual SEO comes in, with voice search in mind. But before we begin digging deeper into multilingual SEO for voice search, let us first introduce the investigation of the future, aka multilingual voice search.
What is Multilingual Voice Search?
With the evolution of technology, search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex, and others enhance their user experience and make search more accessible than ever. Keeping up with these efforts, they now let people talk to them in their language, understand it and yield the results they were searching for. Moreover, more than 23 percent of American households use digital assistants, and nearly 27 percent of people conduct voice searches using smartphones. This number is expected to increase by more than nine percent in 2021 alone.
This increase in the popularity of voice assistants, and multilingual voice search inadvertently leads to the demand for multilingual SEO for voice search. This means more and more people will converse with Google in languages other than English. A German native is likely to search for something by talking in German. A native Indian could use any of the 100+ languages spoken in India, and a US national may use English, Spanish, or some other language. But do you need to optimize your website for multilingual searches? Yes. How else will your website reach your target audience that searches in their native language?
Combining Multilingual SEO with voice search
So far, there are guides only for either multilingual SEO or voice search. However, gauging the rising importance of this relatively new search, we present you with a guide that combines voice search and multilingual SEO.
What is Multilingual SEO?
Multilingual SEO is a practice that adapts your website to cater to your target audience that uses multi-linguistic search. It involves translating the web page, using the right keywords, and optimizing accordingly. We will go into the details below. Notice how Google yields Hindi results for a search conducted in Urdu/Hindi. That’s because these results were optimized for multilingual voice searches.
Voice search: The search for the future
Voice searches are hugely different from regular typing searches. When typing, you want to make a minimum physical effort, that is, typing, and get results. Anyway, when speaking, you are not doing any physical activity and just talking. Therefore, voice searches tend to be longer and have a more conversational style and tone.
Let’s take an example.
A person looking for a Chinese restaurant will do it in two ways: voicesearch and regular search. Thiss person will type something like “best Chinese restaurant near me.” On the other hand, when using voice search, they will say, “He,y Google, tell me about the best Chinese restaurants I can go to right now.”
Do you see the difference? To optimize for voice assistants, you must adapt to this difference when doing SEO. Adding the multilingual touc, you’ll have a multilingual voice search. From the example above, I searched for the weather in my city. If I were typing, I would’ve typed “[my city name] weather.” However, when using voice, I used a complete phrase in my native language, and google yielded results in that language. These results showed that they were optimized for multilingual voice searches.
How to Do Multilingual SEO for Voice Searches?
Now, if you want to cater to a global audience and expand your reach. If you want your website to rank when your target audience searches for something you offer, in their language; youu need multilingual SEO. Below we are discussing some steps to optimizing your website for multilingual searches:
Keyword Research
No SEO strategy can ever start without keyword research. Therefore, before you begin doing multilingual SEO for your website, you need to perform proper keyword research. You can’t just solve the keywords or phrases. When translating your website Because a keyword that has a high search volume in one language may not be viable when translated into another language.