It’s common practice to keep all terms consistent throughout a translation project, and a glossary would be even provided to ensure this.
But if the translated texts are to be used for SEO, consistent terminology could be harmful to SEO rankings, because they would eliminate organic traffic from possible synonym keywords.
This problem could be particularly serious for Chinese content because there are often more synonyms in Chinese than in English.
You might consider this a small issue, as your Chinese translator could easily replace some of the terms with their synonyms. But which synonyms to choose? Where to put them? How many times should each synonym appear in one post?
Such questions would certainly confuse any translators with no or little knowledge of SEO – an example why translation and SEO are equally important in so-called “SEO translation“. Even experienced SEOs could make mistakes on such things.
For example, the “best” keyword doesn’t have to be the “best” choice of your article. Here “best” refers to “most relevant and most frequently searched”.
This could happen for various reasons, but the most common one is that the “best” keyword is usually also the most competitive one.
Based on multiple factors, including complex conditions in your industry, a sophisticated SEO would be able to select the most suitable keywords for your certain article on your certain website, instead of delivering an article filled with popular but useless keywords.
For instance, you just set up a new Chinese website to provide downloads of office applications like Word 2016, you shouldn’t take it as your primary keyword in several years, no matter how popular “Word 2016” is, because your site is no match for Microsoft’s official sites and many other software websites providing the same downloads.
But that doesn’t mean you cannot use “Word 2016” on your webpage – you can use it as normal, but you need a SEO professional to figure out some long-tail keywords – or “flexible keywords” as we defined here – for some outflanking tactics.
And if such keywords are properly selected and adjusted all the way, and you have excellent original content about any aspects of “Word 2016” or relevant topics, you would witness notable increase of rankings – always remember that most of your Chinese competitors have no or little original content on their websites.
Of course, this is just a simple example and SEO practices are much more complicated, as all kinds of researches, knowledges and statistics would be demanded for the best result.
However, the simple idea is not to rely on any non-experts for your SEO project, including any normal linguists. A perfect translator doesn’t make a good SEO, and his professional doings might even harm your SEO, as mentioned above in the beginning. And this is especially true for SEO of Chinese websites.