If your business isn’t reaching its target customers online, you’re blowing a big opportunity.
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Inarguably, the purpose of spending weeks and months dishing out relevant content on your website is to make a profit. And if you’re like other site owners out there, you’ve sweat it out trying to heed Google’s search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. But at the end of the day, you may only be seeing a trickle of those visitors bring in sales. So what’s the problem?
It’s time to fall back on language localization to ensure that you’re speaking a language your customers understand and ensure that your marketing efforts are targeted to a specific base.
Related: How to Deliver a Great Localized Customer Experience
What Is Web-Content Localization?
Website-content localization involves presenting your content — including text, images, multimedia, dynamic PDFs, etc. — in the native language of a visitor or potential customer. The big idea is to ensure that a visitor from the U.S. and another from France see the same content but in different languages. You can also target different regions in the U.S., since there are various vernaculars across the country.
What’s more, an example of a festive event can be represented as “Christmas” for U.S. visitors and “La Chandeleur” for the French. Consequently, language localization gives your visitors a deeper understanding of your site’s content and the products you’re trying to promote.
The prevailing benefit of language localization is its ability to improve business leads and revenue. Here are are some reasons why:
Global Marketing. A recent Statista report revealed that in 2019, only 25.2 percent of internet users are English speakers. Likewise, out of 4.13 billion active internet users in 2019, China and India accounted for 854 million and 560 million online users, respectively, and neither of these are native English-speaking countries.
What this means is that you’re leaving a lot of money on the table if your site’s language is not targeting the global market. For this reason, website-content localization can present your business in the best light to the right audience. It also helps your brand to reach more people who live and work in a certain region, since it is targeting the international and multilingual market.
More Efficient Sales. A website’s content that has been properly localized helps the sales team to be more efficient as well. International readers have already understood the product’s information, website’s educational content and lots more, and can ask useful questions to clear their doubts.
Localized content also makes it easier for local marketing teams to understand the site’s information and relay it better to prospective customers. Think of it as a perfect sales pitch. Coupled with that, the sales process is faster, and employee-customer interaction is enhanced to bring about higher levels of satisfaction.
Better Search-Engine Visibility. Google and other top search engines seek to offer the best possible results and enhance user experience. This is why one way to trigger massive traffic to your website is to localize the site’s meta keywords and tags. It all begins with optimizing your website’s SEO to cater for different languages and countries.
For starters, tools such as Google Analytics can give you an insight into where your visitors are coming from, helping you to strategize on targeting these locations using white-hat SEO. The result can be very rewarding in the end, since your website will also be ranking among the top search results from these countries.
How to Localize Your Website’s Content
Now that you know what you stand to benefit from localizing your website’s content, let’s show you a simple approach that will help you finally drive further sales:
Offer Locally Relevant Content. First off, you need to make your content locally relevant, which means you’re not going to generally target the official language of the country. However, you’ll have to carry out research to ascertain which native speakers in that country are actually your most frequent visitors. Nonetheless, that may be a bit of a hassle, which is why you should fall back on the services of a professional. How’s that? Read on to find out.
Collaborate With Experts. Companies that specialize in language localization or translation are familiar with the language and culture of users in the target market. As such, these experts are well-informed of what customers want and their spending habits. It follows that collaborating with these companies will help to effectively deliver localized and accurate content to your customers.
Related: The Importance of Localizing Your Franchise Approach
Localizing your website’s content can potentially drive sales on your platform and, most importantly, increase your website’s search-engine visibility. As such, if you’re offering the same service across different countries, it can be highly beneficial to customize your content to meet their native language, even if you have to employ the services of a localization company for your site’s language translation. At the end of the day, quality customer engagement speaks to everyone’s needs.