The web is the ultimate marketing tool because it is truly global. Most people use the internet to get information and obtain resources which would have been unavailable or difficult to access otherwise. Understanding the power of the internet makes us realize the importance of optimizing your multilingual website to reach not just the local market but the global market as well. Today people realize that it’s crucial to speak to customers around the world in their native languages to make your business successful. With the rapid growth in developing markets around the world, many companies have felt an increased desire to globalize their web sites.
For globalizing a website it takes a lot more than translating words into multiple languages. Images, colors and density of content convey cultural nuance as well and play a significant part in making your website language and culture friendly.
So, a big part of globalizing your web site is about making sure you can efficiently and effectively localize it. Internet is being used by every sort of person belonging to numerous different backgrounds, cultures and regions, speaking different languages, understanding different perspectives. Maintaining your website for just one group discriminates against other target groups that would be interested in your product/service. Providing a single set of content that speaks to each group successfully can be a sure way to increase your online popularity. Any website that deals with multiple cultures and different languages must be optimized to cater to the needs of all customers alike.
Potential consumers rely heavily on major search engines to find their required products or services. But it has also been found that 90% of all internet users do not bother looking any further than the first two pages of the search results (Forrester Research). This means that greater optimization of a website for a search engine creates better awareness. Thus, you should use such SEO techniques which help you to understand the specific language requirements and culture for any particular language to optimize your webpage and make it more visible.
Optimization Strategy
Construct your optimization strategy to specifically target multilingual and multicultural customers with the same content and website design for all users. Optimizing your website minimizes the time taken by visitors to reach and understand the information you provide.
For this you should develop web templates that accommodate both global consistency and local flexibility. You should make it possible to have consistent navigational elements and designated areas for regional content. It must be flexible enough to accommodate different styles of navigation. For instance, in the Middle East, people tend to scan from right to left rather than left to right, as people do in the U.S. Another important aspect is the word length. German words tend to be about 30% longer than English words, while Japanese words are about 30% shorter. So your word lengths must be adjustable.
Even if a website has been translated into a particular language, cultural differences can prove to be a great hindrance if the content of the website has not been localized or trimmed to meet the general specifications of a particular community. Improper translation can even leave a bad impression about your products and services on your consumers. For the sake of example, English is spoken in many different cultures. However, one word can mean entirely different things in different cultures. Thus, it is recommended to not only translate the message to the target language but also to write the content with the targeted culture in mind. Using key phrases and words that attract and appeal to the target market allows you to increase awareness and retain your customers in a better way.
Here are some tips that can help optimize your multilingual website:
- Carefully evaluate your business needs and establish performance indicators to measure your success.
- Without core standards, you don’t have a consistent process, so you must standardize your procedures. Developing a standard way to manage the translation process is also crucial.
- Make sure to use a translation memory tool. It would keep all the translated material in a database and make it available for any future updates. Thus, it would help you save money, improve consistency, and speed up turnaround.
- Your navigation buttons, Flash objects, textual graphics, and PDF files must be in accordance with the local requirements. The elements of your website must be user-friendly and localized.
- Text expansion should be kept in mind when you create graphics to allow for length variations in text.
- Make sure that the site looks good and works properly. Check the visuals, page loading, links etc. In addition, you should ensure that your web site works well on different platforms, operating systems and browsers as well.
- In the multilingual aspect, if the data is incomplete or not precise, a page often has to be optimized for multiple variants of a word. Thus you must optimize your keywords to make sure you are found easily by every one.
- Real marketing value comes from reaching your target audience with content that is culturally accepted and understood. Keywords are not the only factor in optimizing your multilingual website. Localization is also essential to ensure your content is culturally sensitive and clear.
- Languages require localization of measurement systems, date format, punctuation, the decimal system, and colors. You must take care of the cultural sensitivity to avoid offensive content.
- There are languages which are right to left; like Arabic. It might be necessary to redesign the layout to cater to its needs.
- You must understand how your customers search online for your products or services. It might happen that the terminology they are using is quite different from your targeted keywords which are not being picked up correctly by foreign search engines. To effectively achieve high rankings and good online results, you should do research on what the major local search engines are and what your competition is doing.
- Getting incoming links from non-english websites will further enhance your site enabling your company name to be seen and accessed throughout various pages and directories.
Maintaining a global look and feel is very important. What is important somewhere might not be important at some other place, and one thing might have a totally reverse impact at two separate places. Cultural sensitivity and relevance must be taken into account. In conclusion, optimization of a multilingual website can prove to be a complex and time consuming process. It demands professional knowledge and experience to represent your business in the most professional way. But once it has been achieved, it can give profitable results resulting in more business and more awareness for your products or services. Listed below are some benefits of having a multilingual website.
- It generates relevant traffic for your website
- It improves your website Page Ranking
- It improves your website Search Engine Ranking
- It boosts the number of visitors coming to your website
Having a multilingual website is the most effective way to convey your message to a foreign market which normally would have been out of your reach.
Companies seeking to grow their online business successfully with quality and targeted information should ensure that their content and layout is relevant to their industry and business. A rich website will get more links and directed traffic which will generate business from your website. Bridging between cultural differences and forming the same kind of relationships with local companies in their own language will add to the tremendous strength of your business possibility.
If your clients speak different languages other than English or you want to attract customers from around the world, translate your web content and applications for non-English-speakers throughout the world. Optimize your multilingual website to make it a truly worldwide marketing tool.
Our team of experts can help you start your multilingual website. If you are facing difficulties in developing or marketing your multi-lingual website, contact us today, and we will be happy to assist you.
August 15th, 2008 at 9:28 am
[…] Original post by Rosie […]
September 7th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Great that you are spreading the word about Multilingual Websites. Here is a thought. Web 2.0 and blogs are main stream now. How can a company stand out in the crowd - REACH ACCROSS THE WORLD and find new customers. Multilingual sites are a no brainer. We are evangelizing the concept especially for small and medium sized North American companies that are struggling. Luckily, we are being sponsored by Bitrix (if it is ok - http://www.bitrixsoft.com), a firm that markets a Site Manager with UTF-8 support that enables multilingual web development. I will put a link to this page on my blog and add it to a list of resources that will be posted on a get social networking sites. Thanks.