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Multilingual website project

Published on The brief was to create a Swedish version of an existing UK website and offer website visitors multilingual support. The challenge was to manage both the Web Development team and the translation team whilst keeping to a strict deadline for launch.

Who was involved?

  • Myself as Project Lead and SEO Manager
  • A Copywriter
  • A Web Developer
  • A Swedish speaking translator
  • A Swedish speaking Quality Assurance tester

Process

  • We were able to quickly launch a clone of the English website under a Swedish domain thanks to Google's international SEO rules — which allow duplicate versions of the same content to exist side by side  as long as each version is declared with specific country/language tags.
  • Content from the UK website was passed to the Swedish translator via Word documents with all headings duplicated twice — one to be translated, the other to be left in English so the Copywriter could easily identify and place each section of the translated content.
  • Multilngual Wordpress plugin needed to handle the switch between languages — this plugin needed to be SEO friendly.

On the fly language switching

Language can be switched from any page on the fly thanks to the language switcher above the header. This includes the switching of images that contain text.

English version example:

IPG Paintball English

Swedish version example:

IPG Paintball Swedish

Swedish keyword research considerations

The population of Sweden is only 9.5m vs the UK's 64.1m, so it was hardly surprising that 'paintball' and 'paintballing' had a much lower search volume in Sweden. 

What was surprising is that the word 'paintballing' simply isn't used in the Swedish language –  the only reason it gets the same search volume here as 'paintball' is because Google considers it a synonym of 'paintball'.

English keywords example:

IPG Paintball English Keywords

Swedish keyword example:

IPG Paintball Swedish Keywords

Taking advantage of multilingual SEO

An advantage of having both English and Swedish versions of content on the same website is that both languages can rank independently, allowing you to target both English and Swedish versions of keywords and effectively take up double the usual search engine real estate.

Google SERPs example:

IPG Paintball English SERPs

Results

The client is enjoying increased brand exposure in Sweden. Customers are also appreciative of the language choice – something that many Swedish rivals hadn't taken the time to offer their visitors.