Content Translation

This data was originally featured in the March 26th, 2025 newsletter found here: INBOX INSIGHTS, March 26, 2025: Change Management in AI and SEO, Content Translation

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s talk about language and content translation. Last week on the livestream, we shared the idea of doing translation, converting your content into other languages. But translation takes time, especially if it’s content where misinterpretation could have serious consequences.

How do you know where to focus your time and effort on translating the most valuable content?

This is where traditional web analytics comes in handy. In Google Analytics 4, create a new Explore report that looks like this:

Let’s break down what we have.

1. Landing page – this dimension tells us the page the visitor landed on
2. Session primary channel group – this is the grouping of channels. We need this because organic search is a big bucket
3. Language code – these are 2-4 letter codes for languages, like en-us. This is helpful for filtering or filtering out language families. This is based on the browser settings of the visitor.
4. Sessions – this is our key metric. We choose sessions any time we want to know what happened during a visit.
5. Put the dimensions in this order for rows: language code, then landing page + query string. We want to see language first, then content
6. Set our value as sessions.
7. In filters, set Session primary channel grouping to Organic Search.
8. For me, I set language code does not begin with en to exclude all English language variants since our content is in English.
9. For our blog, which is what I’m curious about here, I set the landing page filter to require starting with /blog.
10. Set the date range to the last year.

There are a couple other settings that are specific to Trust Insights, so you’ll want to make adjustments as appropriate to your analytics setup.

What do we see? We see the pages on our blog that receive search traffic where the user’s native browser setting language is something other than English. That means they’re visiting us from search, presumably in English, but their primary language prefrence is something else.

From this, we now know what content to consider translating (if it makes sense to do so) and in what language.

Give this a try for yourself!