The Importance of Diverse Dialects In International Keyword Research

The Reality

Keyword research outside of the English language is usually difficult. Most languages don’t accommodate our vocabulary when you perform direct translations. We have hundreds of words related to “happiness,” where many languages have only a handful.

 

According to AskOxford, when asked if it’s true that English has the most words of any language, the response was:

 

“The reason for this is historical. English was originally a Germanic language, related to Dutch and German, and it shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with those languages. However, after the Norman Conquest in 1066 it was hugely influenced by Norman French, which became the language of the ruling class for a considerable period, and by Latin, which was the language of scholarship and of the Church. Very large numbers of French and Latin words entered the language. Consequently, English has a much larger vocabulary than either the Germanic languages or the members of the Romance language family to which French belongs.”

 

Understanding Linguistic Diversity

 

Linguistic diversity is basically mapping all of the languages spoken within one country. It may stem from ethnic minority languages, such as Hungarians who live in Romania, to official multi-lingual countries like the French Canadian and English in Canada. In India, English is spoken as a common language, as is Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, and Tamil.

 

How To Overcome These Problems

 

Research

 

From your research, you need to create a linguistic diversity list within your target markets. Chart out each language and the population of that language group.

 

Once the chart is complete, you can utilize a linguistic expert or a native translator to then expand on these new keyword lists and test. Make sure you create different ad groups to get the true value out of your keywords and specify geographical targeting if you can.

 

Fortunately, global search to this level is small, so don’t be nervous trying new things. As you find value, you can then move on to more optimization tactics, such as newly translated, locally-specific landing pages.

 

Analyzing Your Target Language Dialects for New Words

 

Pulling out dialect related words within a language isn’t always easy and best left to an expert to identify. Once the new dialect list is created, classifying the dialects to their corresponding regions, even on the lowest local level, will be necessary.

 

For example, in China has a minimum of 15 different dialect related expressions for one keyword across China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

 

More Ways

 

Keyword research is one of the core fundamentals of search marketing and of international SEO. The same principles apply to international keyword research as to when it is carried out for a single language such as US English.

 

However, the following new challenges arise:

 

1. There are far fewer keyword research tools available in languages other than English.
2. In some markets, only keywords from Google are available.
3. Countries and languages can be too small to register sufficient search volumes to appear in keyword tool databases.
4. A number of languages don’t have 100% agreement on correct grammar and spellings.
5. Searchers will drop accents and space words differently to the formally agreed style.
6. If you’re researching in a language you don’t understand or, in the cases of Russian, Arabic and Far Eastern languages, in characters you can’t read, it will be difficult to manage the research process. You’ll need ‘back translations’ of keywords to enable the management team to understand what’s going on. But you’ll also need explanations for local teams who may have less understanding of ‘search’ – and these will often need to be in their mother tongue language for them to have confidence in the process.
7. Translating English keywords to derive keywords in another language is a common trap and produces disastrous results. Avoid this at all costs.
8. There may be difficulties in communicating – or even buying from – agencies located in local markets. Using multiple agencies also results in an inconsistent approach and variances in quality.

 

The solution is that you must use a mother-tongue speaker of the language to carry out the research (not someone who studied the language at school or night class) and who is ALSO trained in the requirements of search marketing to present the right findings.

 

Ask the researcher to also give you a ‘back translation’ of the keywords, so that both you and the people involved in the evaluation process can understand what’s going on.

 

You need to specify how you wish misspellings and grammatical issues to be treated. You’ll need to look at how your brands are handled. In many languages it’s common for English terms to creep into searches – be aware that these may actually mean something different to how you understand those English terms. Additionally, in languages such as Arabic and Russian you may find that your brands are transliterated into the local character set. In other words, the local character set is used to represent brands phonetically – you’ll need to be advised about these.

 

Bear in in mind that a keyword in English may turn in no direct equivalents in some languages or multiple similar terms in another.

 

Long tail applies in all language to some extent – but it does vary from one language to another. Don’t expect the number of keywords to be the same in all languages – that won’t be the case.

 

To help the keyword researcher, provide a list of successful SEED terms in your start language. These are to be used for the inspiration of the researcher, NOT to be translated. Translation of keywords will almost always result in terms with low search volumes and they may also look or sound ridiculous in the target language.

 

For some languages, you may need to use multiple spellings of the same keyword because of the way that language works eg Finnish or Russian. You may also need to vary the content included locally to provide a suitable platform for your selected keywords.

 

In Conclusion

 

International keyword research can be difficult when you’re trying to expand to the same level as English. You can greatly improve your web traffic and International SEO through linguistic diversity and language dialect expansion.