Jack Ma, the charismatic CEO of Alibaba, said this year at Davos that “when trade stops, war begins,“ and selling globally is no longer a right solely of big companies. Technology makes the Earth smaller, and you can buy from Europe even if you are based in Australia.
Going global isn’t a strategy—it’s a necessity. More and more brands and companies compete to grow their market shares by reaching more people. You don’t have to be a stock exchange guru to see that China and India have become two attractive markets for investors.
Don’t limit yourself; even if you run a small blog or a medium-size online store, you have to consider expanding your reach. Going global isn’t simple at all, but it’s not rocket science either.
On the other hand, reaching a global audience shouldn’t be a goal just because your competitors have done it. For instance, increasing organic traffic is a measurable, achievable, and desirable purpose for going global. In the next lines, I will show you how to increase your organic traffic with the help of translation. It’s a previously tested method, so the chances are that it will work in your case too.
Advantages of Going Global
Reaching a global audience requires deep involvement and a lot of work, but in the long term, all of these endeavors will pay off. Here are three significant advantages.
1. Increase Organic Traffic
Rand Fishkin, ex-CEO of Moz, said that you have to create 10x content to get more eyeballs on your site. I wholeheartedly agree with him, but I guess that he missed the point: you can get more organic traffic by translating your content. The recipe is simple: start going global, create good content (even 8x or 9x content is acceptable) and translate it. Instead of fighting to get a better ranking for “translation services,” you can easily rank higher for “services de traduction”—the French equivalent.
2. Wider Audience
A wider audience is itself a huge advantage. Usually, the American and European markets are replete with products and services. Asia is the most crowded continent, so you will have to rebuild your growing and selling strategies for this market. The faster you re-orientate, the higher are the chances of growing your revenue and margins.
3. Branding
Reaching a global audience, selling worldwide, and translating your content shows that your brand is strong and the business is growing. All these indicators make buyers and investors to take you into account. Getting people’s attention is vital for any business nowadays.
A wide audience and a brand campaign are medium- to long-term objectives, and achieving these goals requires complex strategies and a substantial budget. However, increasing organic traffic by translating your content is relatively cheap and straightforward.
Just follow the steps below
Visitors’ Language
You need to know the native languages of your site’s visitors before starting to translate it. Google Analytics provides valuable data in this respect—just head to your Google Analytics account and check Audience > Overview > Demographics > Language. Here you will find listed the languages of your visitors, and most likely, American English will be on the first position. See what other languages your visitors speak, and consider translating your content into these languages.
Identify Your Best-Performing Content
Your best-performing content very much depends on your site. It will cost you a fortune to translate your entire site if you run a content-rich blog or news magazine. A small site is cheaper to translate into multiple languages. If you want to test the waters or are on tight budget, identify your best-performing content and translate it. Once again, Google Analytics is gold for revealing your top performing posts. Make sure that they are relevant to your new target audience. For example, if you run a blog for people learning new languages, and your best-performing post is a list of resources to learn French, does it make sense to translate it into French? I doubt it!
Effective Translation
Identifying your visitors’ languages and your best blog posts is a matter of five to ten minutes. Choosing the translation method, the agents to do it, the budget, and the number of languages is way more difficult. There are two options when it comes to content translation: plugins vs. a translation agency.
Translation via Plugins
WordPress users are the most blessed—there are many effective translation plugins. Weglot, WPML, and qTranslate are some of the best translation plugins. The prices are relatively reasonable, and your content will be translated in no time.
The negative aspect of using a plugin is the accuracy and quality of the translation. Year after year, these plugins have become better, but they’re still not satisfactory, and there is nothing more disrespectful to customers than poorly translated content. It shows how much you respect or disrespect their culture and language.
Translation via Agency
A translation agency will cost you much money than a plugin, but it comes with some serious advantages. First, the translation quality will be better. A good translator is incomparably better than the best plugin or translation app currently on the market.
Second, the customer experience will be better. A translator (especially a native speaker) knows the intricacies of a language and will tweak the content to fit users’ expectations better, showing that you genuinely care about your users and their culture.
Third, translation plugins may hurt your SEO strategy. Neil Patel learned that the hard way. A translator from a respected translation company knows a thing or two about SEO, and he will translate the content while keeping in mind your desired keywords. Of course, you and the translator should collaborate to get the most from your content translation.
Last but not least, you can rest assured that you handed this task over to the experts.
Evaluate and Decide
Translating your content doesn’t mean that you will get instant results. Organic traffic takes times, and it depends on the keywords used. A rule of thumb is to wait six months to evaluate the results. Check the performance of the translated posts and decide if you want to continue with translating the next set of content.
Translating your content is one of the first steps in selling globally, and we all know that the beginning is the most challenging part. The above steps will help you make the proper decisions—many talented marketers have tested them successfully. However, translated content is a double-edged sword. When its’ done poorly, it could anger your visitors. But when it’s done right, it could bring considerably more leads and customers.
What do you think? Will you consider selling globally or increasing your traffic by translating the content? Please leave a comment with your ideas.