We all know that one of the most important metrics that your blog is focused on is traffic. However, for a new blog, traffic often comes through in a trickle. For many initial bloggers, this can be quite frustrating. Perhaps there is something that you are missing?

If you are reading this article in another language than English, it has been automatically translated by our WordPress Multilingual Plugin.

If your blog is only in English or one language, then you are indeed missing something. In fact, only 26% of users online speak English with Chinese coming in a close second. Therefore, if you are only presenting your site in English, you are drastically reducing the reach of your blog.

We started a blog on our site and posted regular updates. We saw the growth that we were typically expecting as our range of keywords started to increase. However, given that we were using the WPML WordPress plugin, translating each of our blog posts individually was not an option. This would have take an inordinate amount of time so we decided to leave our posts in English. That was until we completed development of our revolutionary new WordPress multilingual plugin. The results surprised us…

Increasing Traffic with our Plugin

We had been developing our WordPress multilingual plugin for quite some time and when it was finally ready to launch, we wanted to try it out on our own site. More particularly, we wanted to see what the affect would be on our blog traffic when we automatically translated it into 5 different languages. This happened on the 26th of June of this year.

If we take a look at the below graph from the analytics of our blog, you can see long term steady traffic we were getting at the beginning of the month. However, on the 26th of June, our traffic all of a sudden started picking up exponentially.

If we were to zoom into the graph and took a look at the traffic trend for the weeks right before the change, you can see the inflection point of our traffic.

Given that this could not have been a coincidence, we decided to examine the break down of the languages visiting our blog initially and after the change.

As you can see in the below pie chart, our blog traffic for the two weeks preceding the change was mostly in English. We also had only 125 visits in total for this time period.

However, if we were to examine the visitor languages in the two weeks subsequent to the change, the picture is quite different. As you can see below, there were a number of different languages visiting our blog and traffic had more than tripled.

Another two languages that we added were Portuguese and Russian. Prior to the launch of our plugin, these countries were not explicitly targeted through organic and paid ad campaigns. Hence, it was very surprising to see the uptick in traffic from these regions (see traffic below). This increase in traffic happened directly after the 26th of June.

This seems to be happening because our blog posts are now able to reach way more people. Google has indexed all of the pages in our blog that have been translated into another language. For example, in one of our most recent blogs, it was indexed in all of our target languages. Below are some screenshots from the French and German pages being listed in Google.

Therefore, this blog post could be accessed and read by people in a number of different languages. Moreover, translating your blog content increasing the diversification of your keywords. All of the keywords that you have used in your blog in English, are now also translated into other languages and hence improving keyword ranking opportunities.

Why use the Scrybs Multilingual Plugin?

As we demonstrated above, the power from increasing international traffic comes from the fact that our pages are properly indexed in Google. This is possible because the Scrybs Multilingual Plugin was developed specifically around SEO ability. Our plugin allows you to translate all of your meta data, title tags and even URLs. This functionality is not usually provided by other plugins, particularly those that use Javascript to present the translations. I covered this in a recent blog post on Javascript Translation and SEO.

The Scrybs plugin also uses proprietary caching methods to properly serve the translated content. In fact, in some recent speed tests run on some of Scrybs’ internal pages, you our translated pages loaded faster than those of our original English language pages. This further compounds the SEO benefits as most know, Google takes speed into account when ranking pages.

The great thing about generating international traffic is that it allows you to see which regions are particularly interested in your content. Then assuming you wanted tailor your blogs message particularly for this audience, you could make use of a human translator who proofreads your machine translated content. Our plugin you to effortlessly order this review from the translation dashboard. Similarly, if you are selling something online, you could order a professional translation for your store front and product pages.

Conclusion

When it comes to translation of a website, many bloggers assume that the process of translating their posts would take too long to implement and decide to leave their site in one language alone. However, what we have demonstrated is that translating a site rich in content expands the reach of your pages and increases the diversity of the keywords.

Using a traditional plugin that requires manual inputs would take too much time and is clearly not a worthwhile effort. Similarly, translating your site automatically with a Javascript translation plugin would mean that your content is ultimately ignored by Google.

However, using the Scrybs plugin will allow you to reach a Global audience and increase your international traffic. Moreover, the Scrybs plugin really is translating your WordPress site the easy way.