Multilingual Marketplace Best Practices

Multilingual Storefront Solutions

Multilingual is a challenging logistical feature to implement but very powerful from an organic SEO and conversion rate optimization. In order to make your site accessible to different regions it's a requirement to implement. There are different levels of multilingual features and implementation aspects that we will go over throughout this guide.

The first question to ask is what the overall plan for the business is in regard to multilingual and what different regions and markets that you're looking to provide the marketplace to. Your answer and the timing of your launch date will dictate when and to what extent it makes sense to engage different levels of multilingual capability for a lot of clients. They're looking to deliver multilingual capabilities right off out of the gate, ultimately factoring into how we architect the content of your marketplace.

Early Feature & Function Considerations

There are different facets of content on a site that we can translate. We can start by translating all of the labels, descriptors, and action buttons throughout the system. That's something that the marketplace should have off-the-shelf so it should be available from day one, something that the Clarity marketplace offers. If you do want to use specific translations for all the labels in the text and the descriptors and action buttons, etc., you can do that.

In addition, you should be able to modify how specific you are with your translation or type of translation you would want to implement. Whether you are translating four different keywords, text, action buttons, etc., we encourage you to make sure that you have the ability to modify that data per language. The next big piece would be modifying titles and meta information so the search engines can see the titles and meta information. The deeper content would be the last step of translation.

We commonly see folks going from using Google translate to then translating all the labels in the text and action items. Then they finally switch to translating all of the content within the site by using some form of contractor or an internal team member.

Top Level Domains URL Architecture

Another key facet to look at is the way multilingual content ties into organic SEO. If you are looking to take advantage of organic SEO and making the site both reachable and indexable for particular topics, then we encourage you to factor in the multilingual component with the different domain and subdomains. Plan your subdirectory structure and how to set it up for different languages throughout your project, thus preventing the need to redesign or rebuild large sections of your site. It's common to set up a different top-level domain, so for instance you might have a .ca, .mx, .cn, etc. You may have these different top-level domains that you configure and those will help search engines see those sites as unique websites that they index uniquely in helping the rankings of those sites in a particular region or country, etc.

It’s not necessary to purchase a country specific top-level domain; it's possible to just do subdomains. You could do things like canada.marketplace.com or us.marketplace.com and have subdirectories as well. The main thing to consider is whether you choose a top-level domain, a sub domain, or subdirectory, as it does impact the domain authority for the overall site.

Content Management & On-Going Support

You'll want to consider whether or not you're going to be maintaining and updating the content for those multilingual sites, especially within the catalog portion of the products. So, if you're going to be updating the catalog content for different languages often, then that's something that you'll want to factor in. A big obstacle of managing a marketplace is pulling content from third party vendors and designating who will have the ability to put their content into the site in different languages.

One of the challenges with that is that they may be putting their content in a single language while you're wanting to expose that content in multiple different languages throughout the site. You can encourage them to go through a moderation process where they actually complete those translations and provide them with resources to be able to contract with multilingual translators. There are advantages to them translating their content as it gets exposed in a higher conversion rate format to a bigger audience.

In addition, it's also possible for automated tools to translate that content, noting that it wouldn't be as accurate as a human being doing it. There are APIs that we can configure and set up to automatically translate the content as it comes in.

Clarity Multilingual Marketplace Experts

There are a lot of options in regards to content and how it impacts organic SEO and if that's something that you're looking at, we encourage you to dig into some of the topics that we've shared further within this section as well as the resources linked below. If you have any questions, we'd love to chat with you and provide complementary resources.