Often a common error by UK companies when creating keywords for a non-English site is to either leave keywords in English (a big no-no) or to try and use a tool to translate them.

The latter doesn’t work, as anyone who has tried using a translation dictionary may have found: words which may be correct are not necessarily the words a native speaker would use.

This is important when looking at keywords, as the words people use to search the Internet are based on behaviours and local habits which inevitably very from country to country. Compare the UK and the US — we say “holiday” they say “vacation”, we say “toilet” they say “bathroom”, we say “bottom” they say…well, you get the idea.

Looking at the example of “car insurance” in French which translates as “l’assurance automobile”, when you ask the Google Keyword Tool to give you the volume of searches for this term it responds with “not enough data.” You have to use “assurance automobile” to get a measly 40,000 searches. And it turns out that the most popular keyword by far in France is “assurance auto” with 301,000 searches. “Assurance voiture” has an additional 145,000 monthly searches.

The best solution is to get a native speaker to conduct research and use those well crafted keywords for the page titles, description and keyword tags, as well as your PPC keywords and accompanying sponsored links. And never leave page titles or meta tags in English on non-English pages!