Most freelance translators or interpreters know that a website can be their most powerful marketing tool. But are you using your website to your full potential? Many of us don’t. Often, however, the issue isn’t the design. It’s the content. If you are a word-nerd like me, you probably don’t know much about SEO or digital marketing tactics, but these are important ingredients to get your website to work hard for you.
That’s why I wanted to write this crash course in website optimization, to help bring you up to speed so that your website can start attracting more business for you.
What Is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a series of activities meant to help improve the amount and quality of traffic going to your website. This is typically done by bringing you up higher in organic searches and snagging yourself a place in Google’s featured snippet. To optimize your website for search engines means tackling its content on four fronts:
Localized SEO:
Our profession is location independent, but don’t forget about the local aspect. Being in a state or city gives you natural advantages over freelance linguists located halfway around the world. You need to display your address and adjust your content to help cement your hold in your immediate area.
Technical:
Site speed, site schema, mobile-friendliness, broken links, and metadata are all part of technical SEO. Though a lot of this stuff seems scary, it’s pretty simple. I have made a handy-dandy checklist for you here.
Link Building:
Google judges your website by the company it keeps. Who links to you and who you link to matters. To optimize your link profile you can work on guest blogging, building relationships with big names on your industry, and getting yourself featured in well-known translator directories.
Content and Keywords:
To rank well, Google needs to be able to match your site’s content with the user intent. This means using and incorporating phrases that your audience (target client) is looking for in your website content. This aspect of translator SEO is what most of this article will be focused on.
Unlike a lot of push marketing methods, proper SEO attracts clients to you, instead of you chasing them. To get there, you need to make sure that the content you have on your website tells Google what you do and why you’re the crème de la crème of your language pair and area of specialization.
A Word of Warning
While spammy content ranked well in the early days of the Internet, that’s no longer the case. Google wants to reward people with well-written content—not whoever can cram the most keywords into a paragraph. So, while it’s important to follow the guidelines below, only do so if it will not affect readability. With recent updates to search engine algorithms, such as neural language processing and latent semantic indexing, well-crafted content is more important than ever.
| Google receives more than 75,000 searches a second. Some of them will be for terms relevant to your TRANSLATION. | More than 2/3 of all clicks go to the first five organic results on a page. That’s where SEO can get your translation website. | 70% of marketers say that SEO is better at driving sales than PPC. Most people resist clicking on ads! Why go for paid when you can go free? |
A Few Stats That Prove the Importance of SEO For Freelance Translators
What Parts of My Freelance Translation Website Should I Be Optimizing?
While the other three aspects are important, keyword-based SEO is what you’ll want to tackle first. Above all else, you want to focus on creating well-written content that truly helps your translation clients find what they’re looking for. But, there’s a way to balance readability with user intent and keyword density.
When it comes to freelance translation websites, there are six main areas where you’ll want to include keywords and phrases in the following places:
Page Titles
This is the name of your page. It’s what’ll display on the top of search engines and in your browser tag. Thirty percent of search engine experts believe the title is the most important SEO element.
You’ll need to keep your titles under 60 characters. Typically, you’ll want to include your main service and business name. For example, “Swedish Marketing Translator | Tess Whitty Services.”
Meta Descriptions
Underneath your title in search, you’ll find a short little description of your business or service. This is the meta description.
Though it’s no longer an SEO factor, meta descriptions are a key part of convincing people to visit your freelance translation website. Keep them under 300 characters and include a call-to-action for the best results.
Alt. Tags
These are descriptions associated with images on your website. They help the visually-impaired to better understand your content.
Please be sure to describe the image posted. Any keyword phrases should be inserted naturally and make sense for the picture provided.
Headings
Much like an article, your website should be broken into sections. Headings (H1, H2, etc.) are the titles associated with those sections.
Use headings to help users better navigate your content. Keywords can be inserted as logical to assist with that.
Inner Content
You’ll want to have a page for each of your main services and each area of expertise. This is also where your blog comes into play.
Don’t just copy content back and forth! Put some thought into what you’re writing and clearly communicate both your expertise and your experience.
URL Slug
This is the content that comes after your domain in the URL. For example, the slug of this page is ‘freelance-translator-SEO.”
When writing a slug, you can omit placeholder words like “and” or “the.” You should also leave out any numbers as these are often updated.
How Do I Pick the Right Keywords?
In the simplest terms possible, a keyword is a phrase that someone uses to find what they’re looking for in Google. These are the words you’ll want to have and the concepts you’ll want to reference in your content. Though there are potentially hundreds of different ways someone can search for a freelance translator, you’ll want to focus on search terms that:
You Want to Be Found For:
If you specialize in French-to-English legal translation, you’re probably not looking to translate picture books. So, you’ll want to eliminate terms that are too generalized and irrelevant to your business. To know what you want to be found for, it’s important to select a niche and vertical.
People Are Looking for It:
While you might be able to rank for “Klingon to Elven Patent Translation,” that won’t necessarily help grow your business. You’ll want to make sure that the SEO keywords you use for your freelance business are actually things that customers are looking up. If they’re not, you’re wasting your time.
It’s Not Too Hard to Get:
You’re going to have a hard time ranking well for “Spanish Translator.” Too many people want to be in that number one spot. So, you’ll want to strike a balance between specificity and desirability. Most keyword tools use color-coding to rank difficulty. Green means go and red means no.
To determine whether your desired term fits the above criteria, use a keyword research tool like Google Trends, LSI Graph, Mangools, or KWfinder.
Keywords for Freelance Translators
Below are a few examples of term combinations to include in your content:
- [Language] + [Industry] + Translator
- [Language] +[Industry] + Translator
- [Language] +[Document] + Translation
- [Language] + Document] + [Translator]
- Translate + [Document] + [Language]
- [Industry] + [Language] Translator
- [Industry] + [Language] +Translation
- [Language] + [Industry] + Translator
- [Language] + Translation + Industry
Localizing SEO For Your Language Pair
Now that you have optimized your site for one of your languages, it’s time to do it all over again. First, you should focus on creating and optimizing your website for the language your target clients use. After that, if you have the time and energy, it’s a great idea to also create and optimize it for your “other” language.Search behaviors and chosen keywords differ wildly between cultures and countries.
Therefore, a straight translation is rarely the best choice. Though that may be obvious, I’ve seen plenty of freelance translators assume that their keyword research is valid across all markets. This leads them to use words that may be awkward or unnatural in one of their languages.Google and Moz offer plenty of localization tools that can help with non-English keyword research.
Don’t Forget to Track Your Results
How do you know if your freelance translator SEO initiatives are working? You’ll need to monitor them! Though you can use free tools like HOTH Rank Tracker and Rank Tank, you might want to consider investing a few dollars a month in something like WhiteSpark. With proper tracking, you’ll be able to pinpoint content shortfalls and determine needed blog topics.