Yoast SEO 17.0: SEO in your mother-tongue

When we say SEO for everyone, we mean that. We’ve built our tools in such a way that everyone — from beginner to expert, and tiny one-person companies to huge companies — can get a fair chance in the 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 in various languages — of course, it already is — or offering customers support in other languages. No, we are talking about helping you improve your content in your mother tongue.

From the get-go, Yoast SEO understands much about your site — from a technical standpoint as well as a content standpoint. And although getting your site technically fit is important, a large part of SEO is content. You have to provide the best possible content to get noticed and found by your potential readers.

As such, the language you write in plays a big part in communicating your message to your audience. Many SEO tools heavily focus on the English language and don’t work properly in many of the biggest languages of the world. For Yoast SEO, you can count on our team of experts linguists to fine-tune our SEO and readability analyses so they work properly and accurately in exactly those languages. With its multilingual capabilities, Yoast SEO is a great asset in your international SEO strategy.

Improve content in your own language

While many of our checks work regardless of the language, we have some additional checks that are language-specific. We started with an English-focussed analysis a number of years ago but now offer our language tools in 18 languages — in various levels of support.

These are the languages our SEO tools currently understands:

English	Portuguese	Czech
German	Russian	Arabic
Dutch	Polish	Hebrew
Spanish	Swedish	Turkish
French	Hungarian	Norwegian
Italian	Indonesian	Slovak

For all these languages, we fine-tune the analysis. We use word lists, stemming, and smart algorithms to find and understand your content. Plus, we use what we find to give you feedback to help you improve your content — in your language!

Yoast SEO Premium has even more features

Most of the language analysis happens in the free version of Yoast SEO, but, of course, Premium comes with additional language tools. For instance, the word forms feature is a big one. This makes the analysis a lot smarter as it is more apt to recognize the keyphrases in a piece of content.

For this, Yoast SEO Premium can understand the different grammatical forms of your keyphrases. This is done via stemming or breaking down words to their root form. Now, Yoast SEO can use that to find and understand your keyphrase.

An example, let’s say you want to optimize your text for the term [ballet shoes]. If you write naturally, you will use the term ballet shoe in the singular form as well. With word form support, Yoast SEO understands that [ballet shoes] and [ballet shoe] are basically the same things and they count these both toward the keyword density score. We offer the word form functionality for the majority of the languages we support.

Other language-related tools you can find in Yoast SEO Premium include the related keyphrases feature and the internal linking suggestions.

More languages on the way

Our dedicated team of in-house linguists is hard at work expanding the list of languages. We want to offer as many languages as we can, so we can hold true to our promise of SEO for everyone. Or better, SEO in every language.

Updates in Yoast SEO 17.0

Continuing the language theme, we improved the word form feature for Spanish. We’ve also improved the way we look for prominent words, which leads to quicker results. In addition, we have several fixes and improvements for our indexables data management meaning the plugin is quicker to handle your metadata using fewer queries.

Install Yoast SEO 17.0 now!

While this post mainly talks about the languages Yoast SEO 17.0 can understand, the release itself is mostly behind-the-scenes improvements. For now, please enjoy Yoast SEO and write the best possible content in the language of your choice!