SEO For An Online Shop- How to Translate Product Descriptions?

If you want to increase sales for your products in the international market your website should be translated into the various languages of markets you operate in. Doing this could help increase your website’s visibility when people search for the products you offer in foreign languages.

But don’t get it wrong. Simply translating your e-commerce platform into your potential customers’ native language won’t get you to the top of search engine rankings. You have to do some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get to #1 of Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex or any other search engine internet users prefer.

What is SEO and Why Should You Be Doing It?

For you to make sales you need to obtain web traffic. Web traffic is the number of internet users who visit your website daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. It goes without saying that the more visitors access your online shop the more likely your revenues will be high.

To get people coming to your website you can pay for that traffic to be delivered to your website by web traffic sources or you can run an SEO campaign.

When you do SEO you aim is to create organic(free) traffic for your website. In this case, leads find you when searching for businesses that sell something they want to buy. For example, an individual looking to buy their child a bike can type into Google “kids bicycle” and your website appears at the top of the search results. They decide to click on it and are taken to your website. That is what we refer to as organic traffic.

Well done good Search Engine Optimization should place you above your global competitors in search engine results.

What Does SEO Involve?

Use of keywords

When writing content for your website you should use particular keywords that customers are likely to use when searching for products or services you sell. Using the example from above, a buyer would type keywords like “Kids bicycles under $200.” That is a long tail keyword which is what I suggest you use. A Forbes article on increasing web traffic for e-commerce shops stated that “While some keywords gain a lot of traffic, the large majority, 70% to be exact,  of online searches are long tail keyword searches. Instead of searching for “Translator,” a user would search for “Translators in Chicago.”

Be sure you do adequate research so that you come up with keywords relevant to your business. The keywords you choose will help search engines associate your business with them and the more organic traffic is generated, the faster you move up search engine ranking.

SEO Product Descriptions

Once you come up with your keywords you should use them in your product or service descriptions. Product descriptions are important because they help a potential buyer decide whether they’ll be buying your product or not.

If you don’t manufacture the products you sell a manufacturer usually includes product description outlines showing features, benefits of using the item and so on. If it is a global brand these descriptions are usually translated into several languages. This should also be the case with photo captions.

I know you may think to simply copy and paste their descriptions on your website. I strongly disapprove of this move.

Doing so will have a negative impact on your search engine ranking. Search engines like new content that gives users new information so they may penalize you for copied content. Check out this quote from Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines July 2018 “The lowest rating is appropriate if all or almost all of the MC (main content) on the page is copied with little or no time, effort, expertise, manual curation, or added value for users. Such pages should be rated lowest, even if the page assigns credit for the content to another source.”

Even if you try to make the content your own by changing a word or two Google says the practice is probably more counterproductive than actually helping your website.”

So for SEO effectiveness, you should read through the manufacturer’s product descriptions and then create your own unique content with your own words. Having a translator also go through descriptions done in different languages by a manufacturer may also be worth your time. A manufacturer may not have taken much time to prepare the translations and could have made several mistakes. Catching these errors before you put a product description in a foreign language on your website could help save your business from embarrassment and loss of revenue.

Remember! Don’t make very short product descriptions. Several sentences will not be enough for the content to position well.

Content Creation

You should not only focus on product reviews. Your website should have a blog section. In this section, you’ll be posting new content regularly. Again the content created should have your keywords and it should be translated to be understood by your target audiences. Also, include links for products within blog content to drive traffic to the sales section of your online shop. Regular blog posting should help boost your websites search engine ranking and increase organic traffic.

I know that your business probably sells dozens of items and creating content for each and every product or service may be cumbersome. I suggest you go about this in two ways.

1. You could outsource the writing so that you can concentrate on converting traffic coming to your website. The person or company you hire should create good SEO content and help you in translation so that you don’t make any gaffes.
2. The second option would be to involve your customers. Allowing them to make product reviews will help you know what they think about your product or service and at the same time, you get unique content that informs other buyers.

Ensure you regularly monitor customer reviews so that you can immediately address any concerns that may to stated in this section. Many businesses have gone under because they ignored what their customers were saying.

Final Words

Doing SEO for your multilingual websites is not a one-time thing, It is something you need to do continuously. When you start the process results may not show immediately. In fact, SEO can take up to 6 months before you see results so you need to be patient.

But if you keep at it and ensure you give the various market the right content in their native language profits will be coming your way in no time.

Translation of your offer? We provide the highest quality!