Reach a Larger Audience with Website Translation & Optimization

As we all know, English is only the third most spoken language on Earth, running neck-and-neck with Spanish. Supposedly, there are millions of more consumers in the world who have access to the internet and are able to reach a website but are unable to read it. Expanding an ecommerce business globally is often the next big step for successful companies.

Localization is the process of adjusting a website for another culture. It is more than just translating the given words out of English. Different cultures and regions have their own standards for design, symbolism, layout and color, and understanding these differences is important to the success of any website.

When trying to reach a larger audience or planning to launch a business in a new country, the first step is to go on board with the website translation. Setting up a multilingual e-commerce store brings with it a surplus of new prospects that was earlier out of reach. Additionally, cross border e-commerce is on the upswing with over 900 million customers expected to purchase products internationally on the web in 2020, all due to Covid-19. It is high time businesses start thinking about going multilingual.

By going multilingual, businesses open up offerings to new sectors of customers in both domestic and international markets. The expansion of the customer base and consequent upsurge in sales is sure to make the early investment worthy. In fact, the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) released a study showing that on average every €1 spent on localizing your website yields €25 in return.

While website translation has many gains such as building brand awareness in the new market, aggregating engagement rates with the target audience and transforming leads into sales, but merely getting a website translated isn’t going to be sufficient enough to make these opportunities a reality. The most important factor to consider while localizing a website is optimizing the content of the website for search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for driving traffic to websites, and this doesn’t change just because a website is now in a different language. The main driving force behind the success of any e-commerce website is search engine optimization. The ability to rank highly on the search engine result pages (SERPs) will often edict how many web users visit the website. The higher a specific website ranks, the more likely it will get visitors, and the larger impact this will have on the sales and profits.

The key strategy to achieve higher ranking on search engines is not only to translate a website’s content, but also to have it indexed on SERPs which means that it’s optimized for all international SEO. This method includes having all of the content on website, including metadata and tags, translated. This also involves having unique URLs with language specific subdomains or subdirectories. While doing this, ensuring that a website is planned and structured so that search engine bots can effortlessly scan through it, resulting in higher rankings.

Succeeding in organic search today necessitates optimizing for a mish mash of factors that search engines consider significant – Technical SEO, On-page SEO and Off-page SEO.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a route to improve a website’s structure. It is a non-content based method that specifically focuses on improving the website’s readability, making it easy for search engines to crawl and understand the content. This sort of SEO also pays attention on the user experience which can have an impression on the engagement & conversion rate of a website.

Elements involved in the technical SEO are: URL Structure, Indexing, Site speed, Crawlability, Mobile optimization and Security.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO (also known as on-site SEO) states to the run-through of optimizing web pages to progress a website’s search engine rankings and earn organic traffic. In addition to publishing pertinent, high-quality content, on-page SEO comprises of optimizing headlines, HTML tags (title, meta, and header), and images. It also means making sure that a website has a high level of proficiency, reliability, and credibility. On-page SEO aids search engines to apprehend what a particular website is all about, which is necessary if a business wants to efficaciously rank in the top of the search results. On-page SEO contains keyword research, keyword optimization, page optimization and content construction. Most businesses make the error of thinking they can just use Google Translate for SEO tasks such as translating keywords – which does not work. This is why multilingual keyword research is required for all new target markets to make sure the most suitable keywords are being used, which will result in more traffic to a website. Similarly, the metadata, along with the other SEO elements, will need to be reworded in a way that makes logic and still comprehends the relevant keywords needed for optimization. If a website has previously been localized then it will involve multilingual SEO to be carried out by a native professional in the language that is targeting the audience.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO basically tells Google what others think about your site. “Off-Page SEO” states to all of the actions that your business and others do away from your website to raise the ranking of a page with search engines. Common off-page SEO actions comprise of building backlinks, boosting branded searches, and accumulating engagement and shares on social media.

Google search is built on something called PageRank: an algorithm that looks at the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to a web page. Hence, backlinks are possibly the most precarious part of off-page SEO.

Off-page SEO is all about establishing the power and reliability of any business website. Constructing a domain authority supports search engines to see that a website is a perfect search product because the content is from a reliable and dependable source, consequently the greater authority a domain has the improved chance it has at ranking in the top search results of search engines. The foremost things to ruminate with off-page SEO are backlinks (getting other trusted websites to link to your content), launching a social media presence that assists uninterrupted traffic to a website, email marketing to support convert website visitors into customers, and content marketing to involve the targeted audience and add value.

No doubt, driving traffic to any sort of website can be baffling, but if businesses and companies direct their teams towards the goals set and collaborate with language translating agencies, then together they can apply an all-inclusive methodology that reflects all of the above mentioned points and businesses can have a good chance at getting their websites and e-commerce sites ranked on top in the search results.