Perfect synchronization. If you want to see it on full display in a breathtaking fashion, watch a local rowing team race. After hours and hours of practice, the team comes together, moving through all four stages of the stroke in perfect unison – oars hitting the water within fractions of a second, sending the boat down the channel with minimal waste of energy. The entire crew works as one to achieve the same goal.

Inspiring mental image, but what does it have to do with localization? Grab the oar, and let’s think it through. Coordinating terminology across translations, channels, and projects to maintain a consistent brand voice is every bit as challenging as getting eight individuals to coordinate strokes.

But when it’s done well, your brand meets the consumer in each of your markets precisely as it should with every touchpoint – and, further, the consistent use of terminology in each market allows you to maximize your SEO results. Like rowing, this coordinated effort yields ever greater results with less effort.

Terminology Management Workflows: The Secret to Communication Synchronization

Just like a crew boat has a coxswain in the stern to guide the boat’s direction, a terminology workflow formalizes the translation process to guarantee your translated content remains unique in tone, clear in communication, distinct from your competitors, and, most importantly, consistent.

The Chaos Before the Advent of Terminology Workflow

Despite everyone’s best intentions, translation is often relegated to a rush job and sent to a third party where the translator doesn’t have access to all the relevant information to guide voice and tone in translation. The result is inconsistent content that leaves customers confused or unsure of the intent of your message.

As a business that got our start in Language Quality Assurance (LQA), solving these inconsistencies became one of the biggest keys to helping customers succeed. And we, of course, found the fastest, most cost-effective way to solve these inconsistencies was to prevent them in the first place.

Directing the Oars to Drive Results: Terminology Management 101

Formalizing the translation process to capture commonly used terms, phrases, and industry jargon lets you catalog and store these translation fragments for future use.

The basic process is quite simple: perform an audit in the starting language and highlight consistently used technical terms that “stick out” as not general language.

Success Starts with Source Terminology Management

Once you have the terms identified from the audit above, you can create notes to briefly explain the term and the context of its use. A searchable terminology management database or “termbase” lets the translation team, who may not be technical experts in your field (but ought to be) quickly and consistently translate these unique terms faster and with less guesswork. This information will make any translator’s job easier – and ensure proper translations every time the term is used.

Branded Source Terminology: Keeping You Sounding Brand-Right All Around

How important is keeping your brand’s personality consistent? Consider this: If you are multilingual, your personality shines through in any language you are conversing. And even within the bounds of local culture, your personality is still you.

A brand does the same thing across markets and languages. Cataloging your personality in the source language allows you to consistently translate your brand’s spirit into the new language: Are you approachable? Light-hearted? Serious?

Language conveys all those things – and making sure it’s consistent is what capturing your Branded Source Terminology is all about.

Target Terminology Management Means Nothing is “Lost in Translation”

Specialized terms, industry jargon, and local SEO terms are all tracked and logged on the target terminology side of your system. This gives translators a consistent voice to work toward. It’s also far more efficient from a translation standpoint, as new translation vendors can be brought up to speed faster, and QA (Quality Assurance) systems have terms to check against.

Target Terminology Management as an SEO Strategy

Some companies put off international and multilingual SEO until localization is complete. This is a mistake – primarily since 90% of searches are conducted in a user’s native language.

By laying the groundwork for the SEO campaign during your website localization planning and entering these terms as part of your Target terminology, you can keep the budget in check and reduce ad hoc strategy re-works as you build the content for each market.

Custom or “Off-the-Shelf” Terminology Management? We Can Help You Decide

With over a decade of experience in the localization industry, we have plenty of experience with workflow implementation. We can help you decide if one of the industry-available terminology management systems is the right choice or if you need something custom.

In addition, we can work with your teams to define roles and responsibilities, help balance the needs of SEO and branded communications in every market and create processes that streamline change terminology management as the business and SEO needs arise. Just drop us a line, and we’ll get your team rowing like the champs they are!

We get it. Search Engine Optimization is a tough topic all on its own. And when you add in the challenges of localization along with SEO, the idea of gaining and maintaining search rankings across multiple languages and markets can get downright intimidating. The word “overwhelming” comes up in conversation far too often regarding this topic. But it doesn’t have to if you look at SEO as a series of opportunities for customer acquisition and sales growth. For this reason, we would like to share 8 SEO opportunities to take advantage of when you’re ready to make the global leap or are already there.

How Do You Eat a Google-Sized Elephant? One Bite at a Time.

By breaking down SEO opportunities into categories, you can prioritize your efforts to gain maximum impact and progress as you become more adept at tackling the topic.

4 High-impact First Steps to Give Your Rankings the Boost They Deserve

1. Site Speed that’s Built for the Fast Lane and Fast Search Results: Google and other search engines favor sites with fast load times (because, as you can imagine, customers favor fast results). A few simple tweaks, like optimizing image size and looking at how many plugins you have (and removing the ones not being used), can increase speed and boost ranking.
2. Use “long tail Keywords” to Spike Rank: At first glimpse, using the broadest keywords for your industry seems like the perfect way to cast a large net. But search engines rank higher if you find specific terms and phrases that are less competitive because they are more targeted. Using these words tells the search engine you have the specific information a customer is searching for. Of course, there is a balancing act between search volume and competition for the search term, so spreading multiple more specific long tail keywords across different pages of your site will yield the SEO reach you need while giving you a high ranking for each of those specific words.

3. Metadata Invites a Meeting Between You and Customers: While metadata isn’t specifically a search factor, these page descriptions appear on search result pages (SERPS) to give human eyes a preview of what they will see on the page when they click. A clear, short promise that uses the keywords you are targeting can make a big difference in clickthrough rate.
4. Content is Still King: It’s often said by Google and the other search engines, but it’s still very much true. The best way to game the search engines is to not try to game them at all. Well-written, SEO content that answers customer questions concisely yields long-term results for your website in a way mere keyword packing never will. The reason is simple: as more readers click on your site, the search engine serves it up as being ever-more relevant to other searchers.

4 Maximizer Steps for Multilingual SEO Results

Adding a second language option to your site to boost sales is a logical business step for many. As an example, Canada is a dual-language country. Therefore, every company should offer a multilingual web experience for its customers. And many companies in the U.S. have seen solid growth by adding a Spanish option to their website.

But going multilingual is not without a few pitfalls that could hamper your SEO results in the original and even the new language. Planning ahead can help you avoid a sales shortfall later.

5. Give Each Language a Dedicated Domain to Make Search Ratings Smarter. This gives your search engine a clue as to which portion of your website each language covers and helps serve the most relevant search to each language. For example:

English: www.sitename.com
French: www.sitename.com/fr
Spanish: www.sitename.com/es

There are three different options for setting up multilingual domains; each has its advantages and disadvantages when it comes to multilingual testing results. We’ve talked about this in a previous blog post if you’d like to learn more – or simply drop us a line, and we’d be more than happy to discuss it with you!

6. Telegraph Your Language Moves by Applying Hreflang Tags. Besides the language indicator in the URL, search engines use hreflang attributes to help understand what to make of multiple versions of the same page that contain different languages. Inserting these tags into the header of a page or through the site map will help crawlers sort and organize your page to make sense of what rankings they should assign and what regions they should be showing a page to. As a quick, if not complicated looking example, the index for an alternate set of home pages in French and Spanish for the English website example above might look like this:

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”fr” href=”https://sitename.com”/>
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”es” href=”https://sitename.com”/>

7. When Translating Pages, Don’t Forget to Translate Metadata. As mentioned above, metadata doesn’t help search rankings, but it is the human point of contact to draw in clicks. Translating the metadata when you create an alternate language version of a page on your site also translates the eye-catching human promise that will get you clicks in the new language.

8. Don’t Let Translation Quality Slip. As a company that got our start in Language Quality Assurance, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention this step. A poor-quality translation won’t connect with customers and, in the long run, will cost you search results as few customers will find the site useful. A successful iSEO strategy still comes down to creating relevant content first and THEN figuring out how to serve it up so search engines can see how it will be relevant to readers.

Sounds confusing? Worry not; Chillistore has you covered!

We don’t blame you if this all sounds overwhelming. Don’t worry. This is where we can help. We have expert reviewers for any language who can check your existing content to make sure it is accurate and resonates with your target audience. And if you need help with the copywriting process too, our team is here for you.