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Yoast SEO Multilingual – Optimize Sites with WPML

Tomer Helzer
Updated
July 15, 2025

Learn how to translate Yoast SEO meta information into more languages and optimize your site for multilingual SEO.

Translate On-Page SEO Elements

Translate titles, meta descriptions, URL slugs, and more

Optimize for SERP Features

Translate schema markup to appear in SERP features

Improve Indexing in Other Languages

Help search engines find your content with multilingual sitemaps

Getting Started

To use Yoast SEO with WPML, you need the following plugins: 

  • Yoast SEO
  • WPML 
  • WPML String Translation
  • WPML SEO (free add-on)

Translate On-Page SEO Elements

WPML can translate on-page SEO elements you add to content with Yoast, such as: 

  • SEO titles
  • Meta descriptions
  • URL slugs
  • Image captions
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Social metadata

To translate these elements, simply send the content they belong to for translation: 

  1. Go to WPML → Translation Dashboard. 
  2. Select the page, post, or custom post you want to translate. 
Selecting content to translate in Translation Management
Selecting content to translate in the Translation Dashboard
  1. Choose a translation method and translate.

WPML will automatically translate on-page SEO elements along with the rest of your content. 

Translate Global SEO Texts

To translate global SEO texts, like the breadcrumbs’ homepage label, follow these steps:

  1. Go to WPML → Translation Dashboard.
  2. Scroll down to the Other texts (Strings) section and search for your texts.
  3. Select your texts and send them for translation.

Translate Taxonomy Metadata

Before our recent WPML updates, you could only translate custom taxonomy metadata manually by switching language from the admin. Now, you can do so from the Translation Dashboard.

Example of custom taxonomy metadata added with Yoast SEO

Let’s say you set a category’s SEO title and meta description. To translate this metadata:

1. Go to WPML → Translation Dashboard and scroll down to the Yoast SEO section.

2. Select Term Meta and send to translation. This translates all custom text added in Yoast SEO fields within individual taxonomies.

Translating Yoast SEO taxonomy metadata from the Translation Dashboard

Translating the taxonomy metadata from the Translation Dashboard overwrites any manual translations you may have added before.

If you don’t translate their metadata, translated categories will use the default (global) metadata added in Yoast’s settings. To translate the default metadata, go to WPML → String Translation and filter for SEO strings (admin_texts_wpseo_titles).

Translate Schema Markup

WPML can translate any kind of schema markup you create with Yoast SEO. This includes product, recipe, review, FAQ, and any other markups Yoast supports. 

To translate your schema markup, simply send your content for translation. WPML will automatically generate the schema markup using your translations. 

Create Multilingual Sitemaps

WPML works together with Yoast to automatically organize your original and translated content in a sitemap. There’s only one sitemap for all languages (unless you create separate domains for each language).

Using Hreflang Tags

By default, WPML adds hreflang tags for every URL variation directly in the XML sitemap for more efficient SEO.

Note: This change is only visible in the XML source.

If you open your sitemap in a browser, you won’t see the hreflang tags in the human-readable view. This is expected. To confirm the tags are there, view the page source – you will see the hreflang tags correctly included in the raw XML.

If you prefer hreflang tags in the page <head> instead, follow these steps:

1. Disable the sitemap feature by adding the following code to your wp-config.php:

define( 'WPML_SEO_ENABLE_SITEMAP_HREFLANG, false );

2. Go to WPML → Languages and scroll down to SEO options. There, enable the Display alternative languages in the HEAD section setting.

Enabling the setting that adds hreflang tags in the page <head>

WPML also supports an x-default hreflang attribute that defines where you send users if their language isn’t included in other hreflang tags.

Get Started with Yoast SEO & WPML

To use Yoast SEO with WPML, you need WPML’s Multilingual CMS or Multilingual Agency plan. 

To learn more about our plans, visit our pricing page. 

Support & Help

Are you having an issue translating Yoast SEO? Visit our Known Issues and Solutions to find a fix for your problem. 

Still need help? Open a support ticket.