We did a lot of Baidu SEO tasks for website localization and we really don’t like the concept/saying of “secondary keywords”, although our partners usually require us to provide them.
In fact, “secondary keywords” is such a false proposition in SEO translation for website localization that it would even hinder normal research process of SEO and waste a lot of time.
In SEO, “secondary keywords” are supposed to be embedded into meta title, meta description and body text for certain times, and as they are next to the primary keyword in importance, their search volumes and relevancy to the subject of the page should also be close to those of the primary keyword. That’s why they are called “secondary keywords”.
When you write something for your site, it’s OK to do some keyword research and develop a list of primary keyword and several secondary keywords for each page, because you have full control of your content, and you could always custom your content based on your subject and selected keywords.
However, when you want to translate/localize your pages into another language – like from English to Chinese, secondary keywords for Baidu SEO could be completely useless and even misleading.
For example, you try to sell some American pickles to China and you ask a SEO agency to do keyword research for you. The agency provides you with a list of keywords including “tuber mustard” as one of the secondary keywords, which is a Chinese special pickle and has a very high search volume, but you cannot even produce it, not to mention creating content for it.
Well, this is an extreme example, but similar things always happen in SEO projects. Your SEO agency would probably suggest copying content from another website or “rewriting” a duplicate post for your site, but is that you really want or what your business need? We don’t think so, because that would sacrifice originality and quality of your content, and probably harm your SEO results in the long run and even your brand.
When talking about secondary keywords, they have to be relevant to your subject and commonly used in the target market, like China market for our projects, and they would need to appear on your webpage for certain times, as mentioned above.
But why do the Chinese secondary keywords have to be contained in your original English content? When your SEO provides some high-volume secondary keywords not included in your content, and you or the SEO agency cannot create any additional specialized content for them – which always happens, why bother collecting and providing them in the first place? They could be provided for copywriting ideas and their search volumes could be valuable data for researching China market, but they shouldn’t be offered as “secondary keywords” in such case.
Therefore, for SEO in a website localization/translation project, the better idea is to provide one primary keyword and as many as long-tail keywords for each page. Here we say “long-tail keywords”, but they don’t have to be long, maybe “flexible keywords” might be a more accurate saying here.
Why “flexible keywords” instead of secondary keywords? Flexible keywords don’t have to appear in the title, description or anywhere else like secondary keywords – but at least embedded once or no need to provide to the client, they are just embedded wherever appropriate, and they don’t even need to have a high search volume – but they could bring a lot of organic traffic by their own or via combination with other keywords.
In this way, your SEO agency could focus on what’s really needed and help embed as many as proper keywords while keeping your optimized content natural, fluent and appropriate, just as the source.