YouTube SEO YouTube in Multilanguage

[liorla]

Hi,
I'm working on a Youtube channel that needs to reach people in different languages.
What my customer did for that to happen is, he uploaded each video a few times with different subtitles and titles to suit every language.
For example, He uploaded an English video with English title and then the same video with Espanyol subtitles and Espanyol title and description, and then he uploaded the same video again in Franch and again in Hebrew and so on.

So my questions are:

1. Is it OK to do that?
2. How would you suggest me to promote the channel for each language?

 

[Stanley | Team TB]

I'll offer my opinion with the caveat that I may not be understanding this correctly, but I do a lot of work with translations and am happy to provide my 2 cents:

If your customer can not speak the languages he is uploading to than there is less value in making multiple videos. YouTube gives you the ability to update captions, titles and descriptions for multiple languages. In my opinion all your client needs to do is update that information on the original video and it will be fine.

That having been said if he uses the YouTube autotranslate option I would advise him to speak clearly, make sure the original language captions are correct and speak in short, simple sentences so that they are not messed up in translation. I would also add that when I translate titles and descriptions I often rewrite them in such a way so that they are easy to understand and may be more pertinent for someone who does not live in my area or speak my language.

 

[liorla]

But if he will only upload one video, how can I do SEO for different countries and languages?

 

[Stanley | Team TB]

Yes, that is a sticking point. You can't translate tags. I don't know how important that is; YouTube will serve the video based on meta-data in the title and description regardless of whether those are listed in the tags, and if you focus on one keyword/phrase you can put that in the tags pre-translated for the one video.

But in answer to your question no, you can not translate the keywords. If that is the sticking point then you would need to do multiple videos, and because that may alienate some viewers you may want to consider multiple channels. Having a channel completely saturated with multiple renditions of the same video with various translations would likely look terrible to viewers seeing the homepage, and actually may be a violation of YouTube TOS (even if you do multiple channels).

 

[liorla]

Thanks. I was thinking the same, but since they already did it and they got views for the videos I won't change it, but maybe I'll do a playlist for each lang