Geo Pulse #58 — Doing keyword research in a language you don't speak

Theme of the week: don't translate your keywords — discover theirs.

The method that finds real local search demand:

→ Never machine-translate your English keyword list and call it done — locals search different words and brand names.
→ Seed from the local Google autocomplete and 'People also ask' run through a proxy in-country.
→ Pull volume in the target locale via Google Keyword Planner set to that country and language, or a tool that supports local databases.
→ Mine the local competitor's pages and meta titles for the terms they actually rank for.
→ Have a native speaker sanity-check intent — a literal translation can carry the wrong commercial intent.
→ Group by intent, not by literal phrasing, before mapping to pages.

Reference: Google Keyword Planner's locale settings and Aleyda Solís's international SEO talks on local keyword discovery. Discover, don't translate.