When you’re expanding into new markets, digital marketing should be a top priority to ensure you’re establishing your brand across all touchpoints. Your strategy needs to include the localization of campaigns, landing pages, and websites, and your plan for search engine optimization (SEO). However, simply translating keywords is not enough—using literal translations of keywords has the potential to cause multiple problems and stunt a business’s growth. Instead, you need to do thorough international keyword research.

Why is this? Regional nuances play an important part in keyword research. Just like languages differ from country to country, people who speak the same language but are from different parts of the world may search for the same thing in different ways. For example, most people in the US would use the word “vacation” to describe taking a break from work to travel, whereas the more commonly used term in the UK is “holiday.” As a result, it’s important for travel brands to make sure content in different regions is being optimized with the most appropriate keywords so valuable business isn’t missed. This is called international keyword research.

Search Engines and Machine Translation

The way people use Google and other search engines to find the information they’re looking for differs vastly based on culture. And search engines have continued to evolve in their understanding of what people are searching for. In fact, search engines can recognize slang when it comes to understanding what people actually want from their search results.

However, when it comes to machine translation, most tools do not account for cultural differences or are slower to adapt to them, including Google Translate. This is why it’s important to have a professional, international SEO services company do the research—they can use their expert linguists to determine the best search term for a region.

Example of International Keyword Research for a Hotel Chain

While some terms or expressions may be universal across certain borders, they might not truly show how the local market conducts online searches. Take this case study of an international hotel chain that wanted to translate its English keywords directly into French. The main concern here was that the search volumes would not be high enough to warrant the exercise at all. As you can see in this table, half of the keywords had no monthly search volume, and those that did are very low.

Table 1: Keyword Translation

Simply translating the keywords results in money spent unnecessarily, yielding very few results. It might seem like not doing thorough keyword research may save you money in the short term, but the potentially lost site traffic means you actually lose money in the long term.

When proper international keyword research was done in Dutch for another hotel chain, the results differ significantly and add so much value to an international SEO strategy. The hotel chain experienced over a 40% increase in clicks from the same number of keywords compared to the data in the “Dutch Translation” column.

Table 2: International Keyword Research

Conclusion and International Keyword Research Services

In conclusion, simply translating keywords does not account for local nuances and doesn’t properly take into consideration how audiences are searching, which leads to brands missing out on high-value search traffic.

If you want to learn more about improving your international keyword strategy, please contact our international SEO-keyword research team.