One main objective of content websites is to increase traffic. If there are no readers, hardly those websites will be able to monetize their content, especially if they use ads platforms.
There are multiple strategies that can help a website to gain online traffic, such as SEO, Email marketing, social media marketing, video marketing and more.
But when it comes to SEO, there is one great opportunity that websites can take leverage and it is to convert their sites into multilingual websites. This way, through an International SEO strategy, a website can increase its audience to a global one where readers that speak different languages can easily get the content in their native language.
WordPress has been the major CMS platform to publish news websites, blogs, and even more specific online businesses such as online stores, business listings and online reservations.
Being the most popular platform, it has the advantage that there already exist the best translation WordPress plugins that can support it to convert most websites into multilingual, but also that comply with International SEO requirements.
Compare what is the plugin your strategy needs
As there are multiple and different types of wordpress multilingual plugins, not all can be the right fit for you.
Some of them can have better control on the translations and some others will have automated translations, where of course, if you need speed and prefer to avoid the time that it requires then the second will be a better option.
You can read the comparisons of one of the most popular WordPress multilingual plugins, Weglot vs WPML, to consider which could be a great fit for you. Either more control, or a free plugin or a fast plugin. At the end the decision is yours.
Artificial intelligence translations
Websites that want to expand their reach globally will have to analyze also properly how they are going to do it. International visitors prefer to visit and read from a website that has their native language.
The days where weird machine translations had tons of grammatical errors is staying in the past. With the improvement of artificial intelligence, the translation of texts are having a better sense in the new language they are being translated to.
Now the WordPress plugins have artificial intelligence translations that can bring benefits to websites that can expand and start gaining visitors from all around the world.
Localize your content creation
As well, there will be adjustments that might be needed to be done to the AI translations. And certainly as they are improving, there will be aspects of the website that will have to be optimized.
This is in terms of keywords, where even if a translation is properly done, a user from another country might be searching for the product or service but using some related keywords.
As well, if there are images in a certain language, the use of wordpress translation plugins can support adding an additional image that can be served in a different language.
Add automatically Hreflang to your website.
Hreflang are code tags that are required so that search engine crawlers can understand that a website has content in multiple languages.
For non-developers this might sound really complicated to be added directly to a WordPress code, but with the use of multilingual plugins this can be easy since they can add the tags automatically.
Adding the Hreflangs is important for websites that are aiming to grow internationally, but there are less worries while using multilingual plugins.
