In recent years, more and more language services agencies in and out of China announced they are providing a new service called “SEO translation”.
However, what is “SEO translation”? Jinray is a language agency specialized in both SEO and translation, but we have to say this is not a good saying and could be confusing and even misleading for professionals.
It’s quite like putting names of two different fruits together and called it a new thing, for example, peach apple – not pineapple, but what is “peach apple”?
One reason why “SEO translation” is confusing and misleading is that “SEO” and “translation” are quite different.
To optimize an article for the good of SEO, you need to be flexible, creative and marketing-oriented; but to translate an article, you have to be true to the original, even though you are required by the client to be flexible – much less flexible than “SEOing” an article could be.
As a result, SEO and translation are always two separate processes, and are usually performed by different professionals – SEOs and translators.
Even if the two steps are done by the same linguist, he/she should do it separately to ensure both translation quality and SEO performance.
For example, you can do keyword research first and then translation, or vice versa; but do not mix them up, because that would easily cause chaos and mistakes.
Another reason why “SEO translation” is confusing and misleading that when a client needs to translate an article and also optimize it, the translation and SEO processes are equally important, but the saying of “SEO translation” feels like “SEO” is just a auxiliary, like “legal” in “legal translation” – you don’t have to be a lawyer or some kind of legal expert to do such translations.
However, linguists have to be a SEO expert to participate in things like “SEO translation”, because keyword research could be very tricky in projects like website localization, as we mentioned in posts like “6 Reasons Why Your Keyword Research for Baidu could Miss the Best Keyword Options“.
Therefore, it’s OK to put “SEO” and “translation” together but be careful about the possible misunderstandings it could cause.
And for “Chinese SEO translation”, we are one of the few professional agencies which are eligible for it.