How resource management software Napta took a different approach to translation management and saw solid SEO results.
Napta is a SaaS resource management solution that allows project-based companies to identify the perfect project teams by matching employees’ availability and skills. In early 2021, the team at Napta redesigned its website in order to launch a long-term and international SEO strategy.
They needed a multilingual website in order to expand into the European market. Their initial plan was to create an English-language website for maximum appeal, but as they quickly realized, the German market would require special attention, so they decided to add German as well.
Originally the team at Napta considered translating their site through freelance translators, however, they recognized that this wouldn’t be manageable and would also require a technical step to display the content of their site.
They instead looked for a website translation solution that could both translate and display the content of their site. It needed to be simple to use, take into account international SEO factors, and provide certain flexibility, such as the possibility to manually translate or modify the content.
They came across Weglot which matched their needs instantly. They had the opportunity to easily connect Weglot with their CMS Webflow. The setup was quick, simple, and pain-free, and as an added bonus, the cost was within budget.
“Today, any new pages we create are instantly translated to English and German without having to do anything.”
Their only initial reservation was whether there would be any SEO benefits to using Weglot and how many machine translations would require post-editing.
The team at Napta then discovered that Weglot also took care of all the technical aspects of multilingual SEO. Thanks to Weglot they have automatically added hreflang tags that let Google know the language of the page, translated metadata their SEO experts can edit, and a website displayed under language subdomains.
However, what’s then unique is Napta’s approach to editing translations. To compete with SEO ranking positions, the team at Napta has developed its own way of handling translation. Rather than using a professional translator, they use SEO experts to make content changes and improve rankings.
“Having a multilingual website and being able to manage it without any technical capabilities, coupled with the time-saving process of manually optimizing things that are already translated has been a game changer for our multilingual SEO performance.”
Their goal was to optimize their content for search engines as well as optimize the translation. Rather than hiring a translation agency, they developed this process since SEO experts in their native language are essentially professional translators with specific knowledge of SEO goals.
However, finding the correct SEO expert required some specific criteria. They needed to be a native speaker of the language that needed optimization, fluent in French (the source language), and have an understanding of the B2B Saas business model.
Once they’d found their freelance SEO experts they would then manage their workflow by first writing and optimizing their content in the original language, publishing it, and letting Weglot translate and display it.
Then the SEO expert would further optimize the content to ensure it targets the right keywords for the market.
The goal of the team at Napta is to SEO optimize the whole of their website. They first started with the strategic pages such as blog posts and product pages, and will eventually work their way through the site.
“I would 100% recommend this SEO approach. Yes, it implies having a budget for optimization, but the results are worth it.”