Are you using a multilingual site? Perhaps your are a business based in Ireland looking to use Irish on your website to connect with you audience? Or you run an educational or charity organisation with the Irish language at its core? If so, how much thought have you given to how you site operates compared to a monolingual site? Perhaps you are relying on Google translate to switch between languages on your site? Maybe you’re displaying both languages on the one page? Did you know that both can have a negative impact on your SEO and seriously decrease your page ranking, simultaneously decreasing your site traffic
SEO aside, Google translate is at best, a rough estimate that fails to grasp the complexities and structure of grammar and syntax. If you’re a bilingual or multilingual organisation, poor translation can have a seriously negative impact on your brand, not just your site traffic.
Why do you need to be concerned with SEO in the first place? Maybe you’re a small school or club and all you want is to start your online presence but have no need for the exposure that an extensive SEO campaign can bring.
Fine, but that doesn’t mean your site shouldn’t have SEO features baked in from the start. At the very least, you’ll want to feature on Google – and if you want to feature on Google, chances are you’ll want your site to feature on the first page of the Google search
Most studies show that between 80-90% of users fail to venture past the first page of a Google search. You may quickly realise that SEO may be more relevant than you thought.
If you’re lucky, and you have a site already, your web designer will have considered the basics for you when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation – metadata, indexing, xml sitemaps, maybe even a few backlinks – although, often this is not the case, with some web designers charging a hefty fee for these ‘extras’.
Many web designers, especially those catering for Gaelscoileanna, claim to create sites that support both Irish and English. Schools often find that these ‘bilingual’ sites are less than ideal and are forced to compromise their content in several ways:
If you are going out of your way to run a multilingual site, chances are you want to be seen and understood. To create a successful, useable bilingual/multilingual website that will perform well from a SEO perspective, there are some important questions you might want to ask your web designer (many of the bilingual websites researched for this post failed to include any of the points below!):
At Aileach Digital, all the above can be taken for granted, at no extra cost. We have dedicated, fluent translators that can accurately translate your content to Irish if needed and our sites are designed to work with any language, if you wish to undertake the translation yourself we can work closely with you to ensure your site operates as it should in whatever language.
Ldt, líon amach an fhoirm seo go dtig linn níos mó a fhoghlaim faoin mhéid atá de dhith ort.
