To capture international markets, your website plays a key role in attracting your audience into buying your products and services. That’s what makes the website localization a perfect strategy to elevate the chances of success in the global marketplace.
It is true that taking your business to a global audience can increase your profitability ratios; however, you will need to put in more effort once you decide to enter new markets. You can do that by localizing your website; this will let you gain rewards.
What is Website Localization?
Website localization service isn’t just installing a plugin and getting it to work; it’s more than that. It is a complex yet profitable strategy that helps customers connect with the brand. You can do that by instilling all the cultural elements in the content to attract potential customers and retain them. Website localization also lets you extend your reach, keeping in view the local trends, cultural aspects and economic characteristics. Catering to all these things might seem like an uphill task but there are ways that can ease the process to get it rolling. Here are the steps to get you started:
- Planning and Strategizing
Planning what needs to be done beforehand is the best way to kick start the localization process. If your target audience has access to the internet or even knows your website language, doesn’t mean that they will be turned to customers. To make sure the target audience receives a heartening welcome, design your website in such a way that it reflects on their culture.
Also, make sure that your website design will fit other languages and will content will look close-fitted, if you will decide in the future to localize it to other languages.
- Identifying your target market
Targeting becomes difficult and costly if you are not deciding what’s your target markets as this will take a considerable amount of time figuring out ways to target every market. Not to mention, you need a large chunk of money to pull off a large-scale website localization strategy with all the languages.
The best way to identify your target market is to conduct research in specific regions to acquire accurate data about consumer behavior. Here are a few things you can do to understand your target market:
- Studying customer preferences
- Analyzing growth rates
- Market Saturation
- Budgeting based on customer data
- Form an experienced website localization team
If you want to boost your success ratio, you can make a huge impact by choosing the right partner that understands your business. However, it is a challenging task to find a team that goes deep into underlying problems and provides you a solution that is best suited to your business needs.
There are many translation services providers claiming to be accurate and efficient but they don’t yield results. Therefore, set general criteria for the hiring process when you go out and search for a team to localize your website. So, it is recommended that you opt team that is experienced and understands your objectives.
In addition, make sure you have a collaborative work environment if you want to get the work done efficiently. It is of utmost importance especially when your team is scattered in different regions.
- Keyword Research- Internationalizing your SEO
After the identification of your target market, you will need to plan the most effective keywords that can get your website optimized in no time. Also, not everyone uses Google; search engines like Bing, Yandex and Baidu are also used in all over the world. So, make sure your SEO strategies are well apt and focused on different people of those geographical areas.
For instance, if you intend to start a tourism business in Florida, people in the US will more likely search ‘vacation’ rather than ‘holiday’, as later is for the UK’s audience.
- Using the right TMS
Translation Management Softwares relieve you from translation headache and other hassles. It is pertinent to have software that services you the best. Below are the key functions that a TMS should perform:
- Integration of application programming interface
- Collaborative functions that take care of communications among team members
- Translation memory
- Direct website translation
- Internationalization
For you to internationalize your website successfully, it is important for your developers to know what internationalization is. So, hire a team who is experienced and understands how to use Unicode. Other things you can consider are:
- Working with a translation company that will be responsible to separate the strings in order to adapt your data to a new language
- Moving your content away from the code and its storage
- Codes for local preferences
- Testing before launching
Testing is a mandatory step in the localization process to ensure the correctness of translated language. Linguistic testing checks the following:
- Use of keywords
- Grammatical errors
- Spelling and punctuation errors
- Cultural cues in the language
- Relevancy and choice of words
- Encryption algorithms
- Form functionality, Etc.
Taking all of this into your consideration while you are planning to localize your website and you should consider which provider you will depend on to handle your project professionally. There are several companies in the market that offers translation and localization services, but which is the best choice for you!
Future Trans is a trusted translation and localization service provider specializing in African and Middle Eastern languages having its offices in the US, Egypt and the UAE. With more than 24 years of experience in the translation business, it has served a number of international clients across the globe.
Contact us now and get your website localized and bring clients at your threshold.
