Edwin Toonen
Edwin is a specialist in strategic content. Before joining Yoast, he spent years honing his skills at the leading web design magazine in the Netherlands.
When we say SEO for Everyone, we mean it. We designed our tools so that everyone – from beginners to experts, from small one-person businesses to large corporations – gets a fair chance in search results. But there’s more, because SEO for Everyone also means helping you improve your content in your own language. As of Yoast SEO 17.0, we now offer our SEO tools in 18 languages!
The world is bigger than the English language
We’re not talking about translating our plugin into different languages - that’s it, of course – or offering customer support in other languages. No, we’re talking about helping you improve your content in your native language.
Right from the start, Yoast SEO understands a lot about your website – both from a technical and a content perspective. And while getting your website tech up is important, a large part of SEO is content. You need to provide the best possible content to get noticed and found by your potential readers.
Hence, the language you write in plays a huge role in getting your message across to your audience. Many SEO tools focus heavily on the English language and do not work properly in many of the largest languages in the world. For Yoast SEO, you can rely on our team of linguist experts to refine our SEO and readability analyzes so that they work properly and accurately in these very languages. With its multilingual capabilities, Yoast SEO is a great addition to your international SEO strategy.
Improve content in your own language
While many of our exams work independently of the language, we have a few additional exams that are language specific. We started an English-focused analysis a few years ago, but now offer our language tools in 18 languages - at different levels of support.
These are the languages our SEO tools currently understand:
| English | Portuguese | Czech |
| German | Russian | Arabic |
| Dutch | polishing | Hebrew |
| Spanish | Swedish | Turkish |
| French | Hungarian | Norwegian |
| Italian | Indonesian | Slovak |
We refine the analysis for all of these languages. We use word lists, stem recognition and intelligent algorithms to find and understand your content. We also use our insights to give you feedback so that you can improve your content – in your language!
Yoast SEO Premium has even more features
Most of the language analysis takes place in the free version of Yoast SEO, but Premium of course comes with additional language tools. For example, the word shape feature is a great one. This makes the analysis much smarter, as the key phrases in a piece of content can be better recognized.
For this, Yoast SEO Premium can understand the different grammatical forms of your keywords. This is done by chiselling or breaking down words into their root form. Now Yoast SEO can use that to find and understand your key phrase.
For example, let’s say you want to optimize your text for the term [ballet shoes]. When writing naturally, use the term ballet shoe in the singular. With the support of word forms, Yoast SEO understands that [ballet shoes] and [ballet shoe] are basically the same things and they both count towards the keyword density score. We offer the word form functionality for most of the languages we support.
Other language-related tools you can find in Yoast SEO Premium include the related keywords feature and the internal linking suggestions.
Obtain Yoast SEO Premium now!
Unlock powerful features and much more for your WordPress site with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin!
More languages on the way
Our dedicated team of in-house linguists are working hard to expand the list of languages. We want to offer as many languages as possible so we can live up to our promise of SEO for everyone. Or better, SEO in any language.
Updates in Yoast SEO 17.0
In continuation of the language design, we have improved the word form function for Spanish. We’ve also improved the way we search for distinctive words, which leads to faster results. In addition, we have several fixes and improvements to our data management for indexable files, which means that the plugin processes your metadata faster with fewer queries.
Install Yoast SEO 17.0 now!
While this post is mostly talking about the languages Yoast SEO 17.0 can understand, the release itself is mostly about behind the scenes improvements. For now, enjoy Yoast SEO and write the best possible content in the language of your choice!
