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Reaching an international audience is a goal and a big opportunity for many companies no matter the size of their businesses. The truth is even when most sites are optimized for English speakers; there is an increasing amount working on multilingual SEO nowadays.

As its name suggests, multilingual SEO deals with offering optimized content for multiple languages or multiple locations. The Internet has helped many small and medium businesses get noticed in a big scale and open up to the globalmarketplace. In this sense, multilingual SEO offers the best way to target your content at the audience of your interest.

Now that you know what multilingual SEO is, you may want to understand what it stands for. In a standard SEO strategy, your content is optimized for one single language: the language your website is written in. This is a good way of focusing on your target audience. However, you are also limiting your overall access.

If you want to target audiences in multiple regions, the best way to this is by using multilingual SEO.In the simplest form, it means that if your site is optimized for French, someone searching in French can find your web content.

The first and most notorious advantage is that with multilingual SEO, you can expand your potential audience. In addition, you improve your chances on appearing better ranked in a specific region and several languages. By optimizing your site for many languages, you are able to access new markets and therefore, boost your business.

So now the question that arises is how to ensure you are targeting the right country. For many business owners, factors such as proximity or size of the market are the most important. The first thing you need to do is define the factors that interest you the most. For example, if you offer coats in England and are considering offering your product in France too but are concerned about the reception of it because of the weather differences, you can use programs online to find the international keyword search volume. This way, you can compare your first option, France, with others such as Portugal or Spain and determinate which country has the biggest search volume for your type of product.

Once you have concluded your research and chosen the audience you want to target, you can start developing your strategy.But, what do you need before constructing your strategy? The first thing to do is prepare an assessment of your current situation; this includes a list of resources, time and achievements. Later, you should define your target market; including the country and language. Once you have defined these aspects, you can focus on letting Google know what language your pages are written in and do a SEO website translation.

Even though multilingual SEO is easy to explain, there are some risks when it is not done accurately. For instance, the biggest risk is duplicate content. If the content you present on multiple pages is very similar, Google will not know which content to show in the search engines. The best option is to adequate your content and add value according to your target’s interests. If you have identified the region that attracts you, work on becoming attractive to it. Use the expressions they use, include keywords and make sure to add value to your content.