International SEO is the cooler, older brother of his younger, monolingual sibling. He goes on weekend trips to Thailand and France, goes shopping in Dubai and Tokyo, learns about local shows in Stockholm and Montreal, and not too long ago he got a degree in semantics. Well, so did his younger brother SEO. But an international degree sounds more impressive, right?
But what do I mean by this exactly? To put it plainly, all search engines, regardless of the language, are becoming very advanced in their ability to understand the semantic meanings of and relationships between words. But where things get really exciting is when you take search engine optimized content from one language and transfer it into another.
That’s because, the better search engines get at understanding meaning, the more of a transcreative approach you’ll have to take when reproducing international content for the web. And transcreation, which Nadja Golbov, a Senior Manager at Leinhäuser Language Services, wrote about here, is where the real magic happens.
Anyone who’s familiar with SEO will have heard of keywords. They’re how we get pages to rank on search engines like Google for certain topics related to a product or service we might be offering, or on a blog or article we might want to share with a larger audience actively looking for content on a given subject.
But over the years, search engine engineers became aware of people using black hat tactics – techniques aimed not at human audiences, but rather at taking advantage of weaknesses in search engine algorithms to get websites to appear at the top of results pages. Keyword stuffing, for example, was one such tactic.
The algorithms changed over time – as they always do – to combat fishy SEO tactics and to ensure that search engine users are able to get the results that are most useful and relevant to them. This eventually led to what is now known as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords.
To boil it down to the simplest of terms, search engine crawlers no longer just look for specific keyword matches, nor do they even look for metatag keywords – they search for context and related words to understand the semantic meaning behind online written content. Yeah, you heard that right; search engines are beginning to understand meaning. Well, sort of.
Computers in general are getting smart. Wickedly smart. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be hearing terms like digitalization, automation, IoT and AI on an almost daily basis. And the smarter computers and digital technologies get, the more we’ll all be adapting our workflows to get the most out of the tools and services we use.
The same goes for people who have their hands in content creation, marketing and SEO. While not a new concept, LSI keywords are becoming increasingly essential to ranking in search results. Even more so, in fact, for International SEO campaigns.
What are LSI keywords?
So where does transcreation come into play? Well, it might help to first understand in more detail how LSI keywords work and why they’re so important.
Google’s LSI system relies on an indexing and retrieval algorithm that categorizes keywords and any related keywords or phrases as they’ve appeared in other contexts on the web. That’s why you see a drop-down list with other suggested related searches when you type something into the search bar. These suggested searches have all been indexed by Google and categorized based on user intent.
Let’s take the English keyword “apple” as an example. You type it into the search bar and up pops a drop-down list containing variations on that word. Chances are most of the results will be specific to the tech company based in Cupertino. But what if you’re a gardener trying to figure out how to graft a Golden Delicious onto a Gala apple tree? “Apple Watch” and “Apple Support” aren’t going to be very helpful to you.
So, you provide a little more context in your search – “apple tree grafting + golden delicious + gala,” for example – and bam! You’ve just unwittingly used LSI keywords. Google’s crawlers scoured the web for websites, articles and videos with variations on those terms because according to its algorithms and indexes, you, the user, intend to graft very specific types of apple trees together.
But okay, you might ask: “What makes an LSI keyword different from a target keyword?” In truth, LSI keywords are only related terms that support a primary target keyword so that the search engine can truly narrow down the results to the precise information users are looking for.
As I mentioned before, keyword stuffing used to be a huge problem search engines faced, because it made it difficult for search engines to provide the quality information its users sought. But if you keyword stuff your online content, it’ll be harder for users to find you and for you to be found.
Let’s look at one more example. Take the word “lithium.” In the following text, it’s difficult for search engines to determine whether the excerpt is from a scientific article on lithium toxicity or from a music review website:
The excerpt has been keyword-stuffed, making it difficult for search engines to understand what specifically the article it’s excerpted from is about. In the following example, it’s clearer that the article is actually about the song written by the ’90s grunge band Nirvana:
If you’re a fan of grunge music and want to learn more about the song “Lithium”, then Google is more likely to present the second example in the search results, due to it being more embedded with semantic nuance. But to achieve this level of semantic specificity in international markets, you’ll need to have your content transcreated, not translated.
Transcreation of LSI keywords
Editing: content creation’s stepchild?
We are the Wor(l)d – Communication as a key strategy for successful internationalization
Financial multilingual content: four key aspects
Social media as a language service: tranlation and generating content
Focus on multilingual markets: seamless feedback loops
