Recently we are working with a multinational language service agency on a keyword project of SEO.
The client has provided us with a list of English source keywords, and we are required to develop Chinese keywords based on it. At first, we provided one or two keywords for each source word, but the client was not satisfied, and they insisted that we should provide at least one alternative for each Chinese keyword.
We were surprised because we never took this as mandatory in keyword research. For web pages, we could provide five or more keywords for each page, but for seed keywords, are you sure about this? This is the question we really want to ask the client, but unfortunately, we cannot ask them directly as we are not a direct vendor.
I can imagine that a pure Chinese SEO would probably recommend as many as alternative keywords to the client, but we are also linguists/translators apart from being SEOs, and we clearly know that some alternatives never show in a normal text, “normal” here means “natural and fluent”, and I think this is the basic requirement for any overseas company hoping to enter the Chinese market.
So, what’s the point of providing two or more keywords for each source word? Can the client’s linguists easily distinguish which keyword is commonly used/mentioned for the industry, or will the client’s SEO bother to create “natural and fluent” texts with all the keywords naturally embedded? I really doubt that!
We are concerned about this because we are not only linguists or SEOs, we are also thinking about branding and marketing of the clients, but our thoughtfulness is not usually understood.