Weglot: Grow Your Audience and Site Traffic with Multilingual SEO
Have you thought about translating your website into more than one language? Many of us have, but historically it has been costly and difficult to do. Weglot is a game-changer for content creators and small businesses like ours. Anyone can learn to use Weglot and start translating their website in minutes! You do not need to be a techy or a translation expert.
Even with just one more language added to your website, Weglot can grow your audience and site traffic with multilingual SEO. It’s a mouthful, and let’s break it down what they are and why you should care.
Let’s dive in!
What is Weglot
In short, Weglot is a translation solution designed to make websites multilingual. Here are some key features and aspects of Weglot:
- Integration with Various Platforms: Weglot is compatible with many website platforms such as WordPress, Shopify, Wix, BigCommerce, Webflow, and more. By integrating with these platforms, Weglot simplifies the process of making a website multilingual.
- Automatic Translation: Once integrated, Weglot automatically translates your website content using machine translation. However, users can also manually edit translations or get professional translation services directly through the platform.
- SEO Benefits: Weglot is designed to ensure that translated versions of your website are SEO-friendly. It automatically creates translated URLs and follows best practices to ensure search engines can index the translated content effectively.
- Content Detection: One of the notable features is that Weglot can detect and translate dynamic content, such as content added by plugins or widgets, ensuring a consistent user experience across languages.
- Language Switcher: Weglot adds a language switcher to the website, allowing users to select their preferred language easily.
- Collaboration and Management: It provides a dashboard where translations can be managed. Website owners can collaborate with team members or professional translators directly within the platform.
- Continuous Translation: As new content is added to the website, Weglot detects and translates it, ensuring the multilingual version of the site is always up-to-date.
Sounds intriguing so far? It gets better with multilingual SEO.
What is Multilingual SEO?
Multilingual SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to the practice of optimizing websites for search in multiple languages and for different regional search engines. It involves ensuring that your website is accessible, usable, and understandable to search engines and users across different languages and regions.
There are many benefits to learning and adopting multilingual SEO as a practice for your website. To start, you can reach a new audience, localize user experience so people can consume content in their native language, and even enhance local search abilities.
Keep in mind that while Google is dominant in many regions, other search engines, like Yandex in Russia or Baidu in China, might be more prevalent in specific areas. Multilingual SEO considers optimization for these search engines as well.
Why you should care as a content creator
Why should you care about Weglot or multilingual SEO as a content creator or small business?
You can be ahead of your competition and target additional audiences just because you have valuable content in their native language. This is especially true for professional sites and services, but it’s also true for creative content.
Imagine a popular podcast episode that is not only understood in English, but you also have the show notes page in Spanish and in Chinese. Or perhaps a sales page that sells your products and services, and now your prospects can understand it in six different languages – English, French, Spanish, German, Mandarin Chinese, and a less common language!
Depending on the services and products you have, it’s not always the popular language that’s going to win the customers over. You could also be in a niche market where a specific language is needed.
Weglot offers a broad variety of languages and they are adding new ones regularly.
How to set up and use Weglot (it’s so simple!)
Step 1. Create a project for your website
Step 2. Choose a language (or languages) to translate your website
Friendly tip: When you start using Weglot, we recommend choosing 1-2 languages to start to become familiar with the tool. As for us, we use Weglot to translate one of our projects (xiangliart.com) into Mandarin Chinese, and our main site (feisworld.com) in Spanish. I’m a native Chinese speaker and my producer German is a native Spanish speaker. While you aren’t required to be a native speaker or proficient in the language, it really helps to navigate and manually edit proper nouns that won’t likely be translated correctly by machine translation.
Step 3. Review and edit translations easily
You can see original content and translated content side by side, making it easy to review and edit.
Do you prefer a visual editor? Weglot has you covered. With Weglot’s visual editor, you can see your website and each element for translation as they appear on the page.
The translation review and editing process can be done over time and we recommend taking it as you go, or else it can be overwhelming.
Our approach for “getting it done” with Weglot
As mentioned previously, choosing 1-2 languages to start translating with Weglot is recommended if you have a big and content-rich website. In addition, you want to create a flexible plan and set realistic goals for translating your website. While Weglot makes it easier than ever before, machine translations aren’t perfect.
You want to review key components, most trafficked pages, and proper nouns first. Don’t dive into your entire website head first. You’ll burn out quickly and miss out on the wonderful opportunities multilingual SEO will bring you.
Remember that you have the option to only translate a few key pages first instead of your entire website. Practically speaking, it can be time-consuming and costly to translate the entire website.
Website growth with Weglot & opportunity it brings
This brings up an important point: reminding ourselves of what website growth means with Weglot and the real opportunities multilingual sites can bring for you and your business.
For example, besides traffic, new users, and more audiences for your work, you might get noticed by brands and collaborators from other countries. Exciting isn’t it?!
This was unexpected to me at first, when my producer German witnessed a collaboration request in Spanish! Weglot opened a whole new world to us.
If you don’t speak the language, you can adopt 3rd party translation tools or use what’s available in your email services. For example, this is how you turn on Gmail translation settings. As needed, you can always hire a translator to help you navigate the new territory. For freelance translators, we recommend hiring on Upwork.
Pricing for Weglot
You can start for free with no credit card to experiment with Weglot.
- Free tier up to 2,000 words
- Starter $17/month up to 10,000 words
- Business $32/month up to 50,000 words (up to 3 translated languages)
- Pro $87/month up to 200,000 words (up to 5 translated languages)
- Advanced $329/month up to 1,000,000 words (up to 10 translated languages)
- Extended $769/month up to 5,000,000 words (up to 20 translated languages)
- Enterprise version (price on request)
If you want to estimate how much Weglot might cost you, you can try their word count estimation tool here.
How much did it cost for feisworld.com (the very site you are reading)? Quite a bit. Close to $1,000 in the course of 3 months. Our site has existed since 2014 with hundreds of podcast show notes and over 500 guides on AI and tech.
Good news: your cost will slow down as the translation begins to complete for a chosen language AND your translation will stay on your website. Weglot will not hide and delete translated content even if you cancel your subscription.
Less content-heavy sites with blog posts once a week does just fine with a business version of Weglot or even a lower tier based on your publishing frequency and word count.
Alternatively, you can always use Weglot to translate the most trafficked pages first!
Results in a few months of using Weglot
It’s still too early to fully assess the impact of our translation effort but changes are happening! We never had any Spanish speakers browsing our website. Just a few months after integrating with Weglot, we noticed Spain (as a location) has entered our Top 5 locations in organic traffic.
The share of traffic from Spain is still small, just shy of 2% – but we are seeing 340 keywords ranked in Spain, that’s only one of the Spanish-speaking regions.
On top of that, our site has been growing between 10-30% every month.
Conclusion: Is Weglot right for you?
So should you consider using Weglot to translate your website into one or more languages? I think it’s certainly worth experimenting.
If you go about this wisely and steadily, good and unprecedented opportunities are going to knock on your doors. Even if monetary opportunities do not show up right away, your content will still be able to help more people.
Please let me know in the comments below if and how you want to leverage a tool like Weglot and multilingual SEO to grow your website and your business.
Want to work with us to strategize your content strategy?
We coach and work together with you to leverage AI technology and smart tools for your business. Drop us a line.
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