Nobody wants to confine its business interests while global expansion is both feasible and possible as well with website localisation. You can double your consumer base and manifold your profits if expansion is on your agenda. No matter where you’re based, businesses give it a top priority for the obvious benefits global expansion offers.
Owners are enthusiastic about scaling their business internationally, CMOs and product managers remain mostly cold. The reason for this is simple. International expansion may ensure greater profits for your business, but it also demands a lot more effort.
Irrespective of whether or not you’re thrilled to expand your business, global expansion is the way forward. The satisfaction of introducing your business to a global audience is precious. But how exactly can a business expand to a linguistically diverse global marketplace?
The answer lies in website localization. Website is the face of your business. International clients will use it to interact with your business. While developing your website keep in mind it should facilitate human to human interactions. After all, you’re serving humans, not machines!
How appealing your website is to your local consumers will determine its success in a foreign market. Otherwise, they’ll ignore your website and land on your competitors’ because they’ve localised it to suit local cultural and language needs. That’s what localisation means and does for your business!
What is Website Localization?
If you’re new to the localisation process and wonder what website localisation is, here’s a brief introduction.
Website localization involves adapting an existing website to the target market’s language and culture. Localisation, in other words, means making local. What does localisation mean is it’s the process in which you adapt your website to a different cultural and linguistic context — one of your target market.
To say the least, website localization is more than simply translating the text into the target language. And certainly, just adding a plugin to your website doesn’t mean it’s localised. Like said before, you’re targeting humans when you communicate through your website. And humans certainly need more than a plugin to trust your message.
Localisation helps achieve exactly that by rephrasing your website’s content so that it resonates with your target audience. You may wish to go for machine translation but honestly, it won’t yield the desired results.
Indeed, the need for localisation stems from the fact that not everyone understands and trusts English. Consumers may not even understand your offerings, currency, and user experience may just sound as irrelevant as English.
Consider Investing in Website Localisation
When planning to expand your business to a foreign market, the first thing to do is investing in website localisation. To propel your business to new heights localise your website so that it supports various native languages. Machine translation won’t do it, neither will installing a plugin. You should invest in website localization services offered by Locate Translate.
As a website localisation agency, Locate Translate follows website localization best practices. Of course, languages and buying preferences change with change in the country, even within the same country, languages and cultures vary from region to region. That makes localisation a really hard task for a business to undertake but with us as your language partner, we’ll shoulder much of that overwhelming process and leave you worry-free to concentrate on scaling your business to new markets.
Our Localisation Services
Are you expanding into a foreign that has a different culture and language than yours? Our app and website localisation services will help localise your brand.
Without further ado, let’s kick-start your website localization in 7 easy steps.
1. Plan for Website Localisation in Advance
Day in and day out, billions of people use the internet for all sorts of purposes from personal to business. Your products have more potential buyers today compared to a decade ago. The advent of the internet not just expedited the process of globalisation, but also made global expansion a possibility for businesses.
Today, anyone with a localised website can sell in any corner of the world. As a result, brands have become truly international by leveraging the internet to connect with more potential consumers.
When Exactly to Begin your Localisation Process?
If website localization services ensure your business’s success in an international market, they’re good to go with. But when exactly to begin the localisation process? The ideal thing to do is to plan in advance.
When you’re designing your website, get on board a localisation service provider to help you with website localization. Or else, if you’ve got an existing website and are planning a major update, while you roll out the update, factoring in website localisation will make sense.
It’ll empower your business to communicate better with non-English consumers. Localisation is imperative for businesses when it comes to serving consumers in their native languages. It’ll help revamp your branding message to re-align it with the cultural context of your target audience.
That involves using local idioms and phrases that can accurately substitute for idioms and phrases in the source language. English may be the unofficial lingua franca of the world, but 72.1% of consumers still prefer their native language when accessing websites. 72.4% of consumers are likely to buy if product information is in local languages, according to Harvard Business Review.
Not all languages have the same line size. If localisation is pursued after you’ve designed your website, it’ll distort the text. By starting localisation while still in the design phase, you can easily accommodate languages of varying sizes by leaving plenty of space for the same in your website design.
2. Identify your Target Market
There’s no doubt about the value website localisation brings, but that doesn’t mean you’ll localise your website into 100 languages. Doing so will not only incur a heavy cost but also overburden your business. Both can be avoided by identifying your target audience and narrowing your language preferences accordingly.
The best way to identify your target audience is to find your core customer base. Next, find out the language most prominent with your identified consumer base and where they’re found. That way, you’ll identify the country and language to target to kick-start your website localization project.
Conduct research to identify buyer personas. That way, you can zoom in on specific geographic regions. It’ll provide you with better insights into consumers’ behaviours and cultures, and importantly, help you target localisation more accurately. Consequently, you’ll be spending less and gaining more by narrowing down your geographic reach to regions important to reach your potential customers.
3. Constitute a Team
Website localization involves a lot of people. And it will always work in your favour if you constitute a team. Issues related to localisation are fairly complex and demand a large workforce. Having a team in place will not only ensure proper coordination but also divide the complex task into smaller and simpler ones.
Regarding the size of your team, it’ll be determined by the budget you’ve allocated for localisation services. You may assign a person to carry out market research by visiting the target countries. Or you may prefer to do so remotely through a local consultant. Similarly, you can leverage Google Analytics to understand your target audience.
All sorts of roles are available that need a workforce. Importantly, your goal as a business is to stand out, connect with your potential consumers and boost sales. You can achieve this much and more by translating your content into the target language.
But here you need to be careful because a minor translation error could cost your business heavily. To nurture your global image, always work with a professional translation agency with in-house native translators. Only expert translators can effectively translate and localize your website so that local consumers relate to it right away.
You don’t want your original message to lose its meaning in translation. Translators at Locate Translate ensure that the charisma, wit, and wisdom of your original message is preserved and delivered to your new audience. Our translators follow best practices when it comes to transcreation.
4. Do Keyword Research
Keyword research in the local language is important when planning for website localisation. You should conduct keyword research right after you’ve zoomed in on your target market and language, and prepare a list of keywords. Doing so is necessary for international SEO so that you feature in as many SERPs as possible.
This is complex too because not everywhere you’ll see Google used as a major search engine. Suppose you’re expanding into Chinese markets. There it’s Baidu which mainly used for searches. Similarly, Russians have Yandex. Take these into account when conducting keyword research.
Simply put, keyword research for localisation is a twofold process. At one level, you’ll identify search terms customers use to look for products and services. Another, you’ll figure out the search engines your target consumers use to search for those queries. Once you’ve collected this information, let translators incorporate these key search terms in the on-page and off-page content of your website, including metadata, anchor text, etc.
5. Internationalize your Website
Right from the beginning, a major aim of website localisation has been to internationalize your website. Internationalizing your website means localising it for other languages, specifically the target market’s languages. Unicode helps achieve internationalization when undertaking website localization.
For that, you’ll need programmers who are well versed in Unicode (UTF-8). It’ll make your website capable of supporting all languages, including Russian, Chinese, Greek, etc. For best results, get your developers acquainted with Unicode so that they can work in tandem with translators.
The role also entails dividing source codes into separate translatable strings and storing the same for future uses. Moreover, take local preferences into account. This may include paying attention to date and time formats specific to your market, even address and number formats have to be considered alongside local calendars.
Additionally, paramount importance is given to currency and shipping address formats. Offering products in local currencies saves consumers the headache of working with conversion rates, so they can focus on buying!
6. Test your Localised Website
Once your website has been localised, it’s time to test how it works. Don’t haste to launch your website right away. Pay attention to linguistic testing instead. By linguistic testing, we mean ensuring every word has been translated correctly. Additionally, it means stepping into consumers’ shoes to ensure translated words are understood. Their intended meaning should be grasped without making any effort.
Localization testing is about many things, technical as well as linguistic. Among technical things you need testing for include:
- Encryption algorithms
- Hardware compatibility
- Names, time, date, weights, measurements, etc.
- Entry fields
- Hyperlinks
- Image appropriateness
- Broken strings/design
- Form functionality
- Shopping Cart
- Load time etc.
Among linguistic things you need to do testing for, include:
- Grammatical mistakes
- Spelling errors, wrong use of words, punctuation errors
- Inappropriate or offensive texts
- Presence of cultural taboos
- Misuse of keywords
- Readability and appeal of messages
- Untranslated strings
Speed is an important factor, so pay attention to your site speed. If you heeded my advice from the first point, your site will be as light and nimble as a South Korean gymnast. Localisation may slow it down a little. While testing your website make sure to optimize for speed.
We live in an age of instant gratification, the attention span of consumers is very small. There’s no way you can afford slow site speed unless you’re okay with consumers leaving your website midway to your competition.
If your images and videos take years to load, consumers won’t stick around and wait, they’ll preferably leave. Apply all sorts of techniques to improve site speed, including getting rid of unnecessary CSS.
7. Keep Localizing
Website localisation is a continuous process. As your business voyages through a sea of foreign markets, you’ll need localisation at every step. People have diverse linguistic and cultural needs, and if you want to capitalize on their needs, you’ve to be prepared at every step to connect with them in their native language.
Only by understanding your target audience can you serve and grow in a foreign market. For that, a website localisation service is indispensable. Begin it earlier, you’ll reap its benefits earlier!
Localisation can be an overwhelming and daunting task that’s why you need a reliable language partner by your side to shoulder your burden. You can outsource your website localization needs to Locate Translate. We offer top-notch website localisation services to our clients worldwide. Connect at hello@locatetranslate.co.uk or call +44 208 609 4852 for more information!
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