Multilingual SEO: The Secret Weapon of Global Videos

A comprehensive global marketing strategy has multiple facets that cover a broad range of media types and channels. In particular, videos are increasingly becoming an important part of many online marketing campaigns. But how can your global customer easily find these videos? The answer: Multilingual SEO.

Why Have Video in Your Global Marketing Mix?

Did you know that:

• Posts with videos attract three times more inbound links than plain text
• Search results with video thumbnails have a 41% higher click-through rate than plain text
• When optimized well, your page is 53 more times likely to get a front-page Google result with video
• YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google

When making a website more accessible to an international audience, it is critical to translate all of your media files, including audio, images and video. It is also essential to make these assets searchable with multilingual SEO so your audience can more easily find your website. Beyond your website, leveraging platforms like Vimeo or YouTube can further increase the number of people you reach.

However, YouTube, for example, only supports a single page for multiple languages, which means you miss out on all of the on-page and off-page SEO benefits for each target language into which you translate. To remedy this, you will want to consider tools like Vidcaster. Vidcaster can help you leverage separate multilingual and international SEO for each of your different localized language videos. It can also syndicate to YouTube, Vimeo, and other platforms and track the analytics for each platform from one location.

How to Implement Multilingual SEO for Video

Whether it is on your own website, using Vidcaster as a white label YouTube or on YouTube itself, optimizing video content both on and off the page will make it easier for search engines to index your website and deliver your links in search results. Remember that search engines can’t see the video itself, so the text you include along with it on and off the page are critical for good SEO.

Follow these steps to get the most from your international marketing videos:

1. Use keywords, but, wisely – Include keywords in video titles, descriptions, tags, and captions. For the description field on YouTube, be sure to include keywords early in the text because it is truncated after 166 characters. When identifying keywords for multilingual SEO, don’t assume that a machine translation of each keyword is adequate. Take the time to research each keyword in every end-user language to determine which translations make the most sense for multilingual SEO and international long-tail strategy.
2. Transcribe and translate your videos – Provide the full text for each video and translate it into every end-user language you are targeting. Use high-quality translation services performed by trained linguists, editors and proofreaders to make sure the content and its context are effectively captured. Use translation services that leverage translation memory and glossaries. When posting to YouTube, include the localized transcript in the description box if it is short enough. If the translated transcript is too long, trim it down to provide a brief, keyword-rich summary. There are also closed captioning options that can help make the script available for users and search engine indexing.
3. Caption your videos – Text captions make your video accessible not only to search engines, but also to a broader audience. Don’t rely on YouTube’s auto-caption feature to do this. Not only do these captions not get indexed by Google or YouTube, but they are often full of mistakes that can create a bad impression for your brand. Much like with transcripts, high-quality translation of subtitles will help with search engine rankings and provide a better user experience for international viewers.
4. Create separate landing pages for each video and each language – On your website, individual videos should have their own landing pages, each with its own unique URL. Do the same for the foreign language versions of the videos and indicate the language in the URL or with the hreflang attribute in your sitemap and a ccTLD. As you add new videos in different languages, update your video sitemap to make it easier for search engines to find your new localized content.

If you are trying to reach an international audience, taking the time to create quality videos in every target language is well worth the effort. When applicable, use professional voice talent and always work with a professional translation agency to ensure that all the content, both spoken and written, is translated and localized properly.

Argos Multilingual is here to help with all of your translation services needs. Contact us today to learn more about our video translation, website translation, eLearning localization and global marketing services.