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Optimize Multilingual Websites for Search Engines Using Rank Math and WPML

Mohamed Khafaja
Updated
April 21, 2021

Rank Math is an SEO plugin that offers many search engine optimization tools. In this tutorial, you will learn how to optimize your multilingual website built with WPML using Rank Math.

Content

Getting started

Make sure that you have activated the Rank Math SEO plugin by navigating to Plugins → Installed Plugins.

Also, make sure that you have activated the WPML Multilingual CMS, WPML String Translation, WPML Translation Management, and WPML SEO plugins.

For a better translation experience, we recommend that you activate the WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor. To do this, go to the WPML → Settings page. Under the How to translate posts and pages section, check the “Use WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor” option.

Enabling WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor

WPML translation tools

We recommend using WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor as it offers affordable automatic translation, a glossary, spell checker, and more!

Besides translating your site content yourself, you can also:

Translating global SEO texts

Rank Math allows you to set global SEO attributes such as the breadcrumbs homepage label, homepage meta description, homepage title for Facebook, and more. You can set these attributes in Rank Math’s General Settings and Titles & Meta screens.

You can translate these attributes in WPML’s String Translation screen. As an example, let’s set the breadcrumb homepage label to be ‘Home’.

Setting the breadcrumbs homepage label

To translate the breadcrumbs homepage label and other general setting texts, follow the steps below:

  1. Navigate to WPML → String Translation.
  2. To display all the general settings string,  Select the admin_texts_rank_math_options_general from the Select strings within domain drop-down.
  3. Click on the Translations link and add the translation. Then, tick the translation is complete option and click Save.
Translating the homepage label

To translate the Titles & Meta strings, simply choose admin_texts_rank_math_options_titles from the Select strings within domain drop-down and follow the same steps.

It is worth mentioning that WPML synchronizes the non-textual SEO values between different languages such as enabling or disabling the Nofollow External Links and the Enable breadcrumbs function options. 

Translating on-page SEO attributes

Rank Math allows you to set on-page SEO attributes such as the page title, permalink, and description. 

Setting on-page SEO attributes

To translate the page’s SEO attributes along with the page content follow the steps below:

  1. Go to the page or post editing screen. 
  2. In WPML’s language box, click on the plus icon corresponding to the language you want to translate your page into. This will take you to WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor screen.
Navigating to WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor screen
  1. In the Advanced Translation Editor, you will find all the on-page textual SEO attributes along with the page content available for translation.
  2. Click on the Translate automatically button, review the translation to ensure it is accurate, then click Finish and Complete to publish the translation.  
Translating SEO attrebuties and page content

How Rank Math sitemaps work with WPML

If you choose other language URL formats, the multilingual sitemaps generated by Rank Math don’t follow the standard structure of multilingual sitemaps. WPML takes care of this by creating hreflang tags so that search engines know the default language of the page’s content and the translation available in different languages.

Getting help from our support

In case you need help translating your site built using Rank Math SEO and WPML, visit WPML’s support forum.