Article Is your website SEO-optimised? 5 tips to help your clients find you on Google

How do you find most of your clients?

For most translators, the answer to that will probably be job boards, LinkedIn or word-of-mouth recommendations.

Some savvy translators, though, get most of their clients through online searches leading to their websites.

Now, before we get started, there’s one thing you should know. Driving search traffic to a website isn’t easy, and isn’t going to happen overnight.

It takes dedication and a lot of hard work, and depending on your business and specialisations, it might be best to focus your marketing efforts on other ways of finding clients.

But even if you don’t want to put all your efforts into SEO and turn online searches into your main source of leads, it’s still a great idea to make sure your website is at least covering all the basic SEO bases.

Ready to find out how to make Google happy? Let’s get started.

1. Make it a multi-page site

Firstly, but very importantly, does your website have multiple pages?

One-page sites can be very appealing, particularly if it’s your first website and you don’t feel like you have much to say, or you’re creating it yourself.

But from an SEO point of view, they aren’t great.

As Kate Toon, an SEO expert, puts it, the more pages you have on your site, the more tickets you’ve got in the Google lottery.

That’s because more pages mean more copy on your site, and more opportunities to include the search keywords people might be using when looking for the perfect translator for them.

So even if you just keep it simple and go for Home, About, Services and Contact, you’re still giving yourself a better chance of ranking well for the keywords you want to rank for.

2. Make sure your website is technically optimised

Technical SEO is a whole world of its own, and if you want to get your head around it, you’ll probably need to do an in-depth course.

But it basically comes down to the fact that Google likes websites that run smoothly and load quickly.

People like them too. I’m sure you’ve given up on websites that have taken more than a few seconds to load in the past.

One of the main ways you can make sure your page loads quickly is by keeping the size of it down to a minimum, mostly by keeping things simple and ensuring all the image files are only as large as they need to be.

If your website has been professionally built, then all of this will have been taken into account.

If you’ve used something like Squarespace or Wix, then unfortunately you won’t have that much control over this side of things.

But if you created it yourself using WordPress, then this might be the point to get some professional help.

A lot of web developers offer reviews, and will go through your website and let you know what needs to be tweaked.

They can also iron out any of the things you haven’t been able to figure out yourself, and get your website looking polished, working properly and ready to wow your clients.

3. Do your keyword research

Keywords are the cornerstone of SEO. They’re the words that people will type into the search bar when looking for someone who does exactly what you do, like ‘freelance legal translator in Yorkshire’.

There’s far too much here for us to get into in one short blog article - we’d be here forever.

So, if you’re not sure how keywords work, then it’s worth looking into one of the many basic SEO courses there are out there.

Some are even tailored to translators, and SEO translation could be an excellent extra string to your bow.

Courses will teach you what keywords are, how to identify the right ones to use on your site, and how to include them in your copy.

The main tip we have is to try and make your keywords as specific as possible.

If you have a very niche specialism or a rare language pair, then you might be able to make it onto the first page of Google for basic keywords like ‘X translations’ or ‘X to X translator’.

But you’re probably not going to be ranking for ‘legal translations’ or ‘Spanish to English translator’ anytime soon - there’s a lot of competition out there!

On the other hand, if you make things more specific you might be able to rank for something like ‘French to English translator in Yorkshire’.

Sure, there probably aren’t huge amounts of people searching for that on a daily basis. But the people that do search for it are far more likely to click on your site and get in touch.

4. Write copy for people first and Google second

Okay, now you know what keywords you want to optimise your website for.

So you’ll need to incorporate those keywords into your copy, and you can easily find guidelines for how to go about that.

Here’s another top tip for you, though:

Don’t overdo it.

You should never sacrifice the quality of your texts on the altar of SEO.

All your copy needs to sound natural, and not like you’re desperately shoehorning keywords into it.

Google doesn’t like ‘keyword stuffing’ and people definitely don’t. Never be fooled into thinking keywords should be your top priority!

5. Keep your blog updated

Got some leftover keywords? Your blog is the perfect place to use them up!

Basically, Google wants to see that you know what you’re talking about before it starts serving you up to its searchers.

And a blog is the perfect way of demonstrating to both Google and your readers/potential clients that you really are an expert in your field.

Blogging can be very time-consuming and often goes to the bottom of freelancers’ priority lists when they’re busy.

So we’re not going to sit here and say you need to be blogging once a week.

But if you can blog regularly, then that’s great.

Perhaps you could commit to blogging more regularly when you first get started until you’ve built up a good bank of posts, and then take it down a notch.

Remember to make the very most of your blog content by repurposing it for your different social media channels, and resharing it periodically rather than just letting it sit in your archives.

Good content deserves to be seen, so share it and shout about it!

If you’re struggling to find the time to blog yourself or are writing in a language that’s not your mother tongue, then you could consider investing in the help of a copywriter or editor. It’ll be money well spent!

Use your time wisely

Here at LSP.expert we can’t help you with your SEO, but we can make your business more efficient, helping you free up time to spend learning about SEO and finetuning your website.

All of which will mean you’re more likely to land those dream clients.

Why not try LSP.expert on for size this month and see if it’s the right fit for you?