Below are some tips for optimizing SEO in languages other than English:

First, you'll need to know your audience's location. 

Various countries use different languages, so you have to know what you are optimizing for. It's important to find the needs and specificities of that audience. Do some research online using forums, blogs, and websites to see how people are communicating.

Once you know your audience, you can decide on a URL. You have three big options: different domains (site.com and site.fr, for example), subdomains (en.site.com, fr.site.com), or subfolders (site.com/en, site.com/fr). We recommend using a different domain or a subfolder, depending on the situation. But subdomains can also be used, there's no harm in that.

Avoid using parameters when creating a website's structure. For example, a URL like this: site.com/article?lang=fr is not that great. 

Notice the "?lang=fr" part. 

Having parameters like these is not optimal for SEO purposes. You should also figure out what words people are using. Keyword research tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Keyword Planner can help with this.

Tools like AnswerThePublic or AlsoAsked can help you understand what people are searching for and what kind of questions they have.

Remember to create a content plan. 

You'll need to either create new content from scratch or translate content that you might have in other languages. If you decide to translate content, translate as much as you can from a page. Ideally, all the texts on the page and all the texts in the images should be translated.

Remember to translate the menus as they are very important for both users and search engines to understand the website.

When creating new content, the URLs need to be translated, too. So, writing an article in French with a URL in English is not recommended. Aim to have a single language assigned to a URL. Of course, quotes and similar things are fine; just don't write a substantial proportion of the text in two or more languages. Remember that pages should also follow basic SEO practices, like having a responsive website, making it load fast, and being both user—and search engine-friendly. Adding another language doesn't mean the basic rules stop occurring.

You'll also need to translate meta—meta titles and descriptions—and things like H1, H2, ALT texts, and image filenames. If you use Schema markup, some fields could also be translated.

If your website has an online store and a checkout process, you should translate things like My Account, Shopping Cart, and Checkout. For each language, newsletters, PPC campaigns, and even some social networks can be adjusted.

For content marketing, you should align your marketing according to local holidays. Different countries celebrate different things. If you have an article in multiple languages, consider implementing hreflang. We strongly recommend this. If you find it difficult to implement hreflang, you can do it via localized Sitemap files. 

Create internal links pointing to articles. Google will find it easier to "understand" the website's structure. Of course, you'll need external links to each version of your website - for each language. Make room for some checks - verify that everything works fine.

How can you measure the success of your SEO efforts? 

You could track KPIs like engagement rates, number of clicks, and conversion rates.

If you ever need to change the URL structure of a page, consider 301-redirecting from the old to the new URLs.

Regarding the future of websites doing SEO in multiple languages, we expect a growing impact of AI in content marketing—most likely, translation using AI will become commonplace. Perhaps AI could even provide very high-quality new content. However, while using AI to translate content is not necessarily wrong, at this current time AI is still no match for top human translators. 

Always keep up to date with how SEO evolves and make sure you are up-to-date with the latest trends. Reading Slicedbread Agency's blog is one solution.

We hope this article has helped you find it easier to understand how to use SEO for websites in more than one language.