Out of all business ideas that an entrepreneur may generate, moving out onto the global market can be one of the most sufficient thoughts that open almost limitless opportunities today. With the world being completely folded in the world wide web, there’s no need to spend lots of resources, go to another country, and search for physical places to enter the business there. Website localization and local SEO can take care of that for you.
Essentially, all you have to do is to launch a website targeted for the specific country and enable shipping there. Yet, what does targeting the website for another country mean? The answer to this question would be localization and there’s a number of reasons why website localization is important and why thousands of businesses today opt to do it.
Here Are The Top 10 Tips For Website Localization
It is very important to localize a website primarily because it ensures familiarity and relatability for your potential customers. Simply speaking, localization is a process that goes beyond an ordinary translation and adapts the content you have to offer or show your audience to their linguistic and cultural perspectives.
Localization may involve slang, pop culture references known in the target country, use of local celebrities, or references to local events, trends, and places. In some cases, localization goes even further and applies to the microenvironment by using dialects and references specific to a certain city or region within the country.
So, this process makes anything you would like to offer familiar to your audience. That’s why it’s a very reasonable idea to localize your website as you go international. Yet, how to approach localization properly? The following list of tips is not complete, of course, but will certainly help you to get on the right track.
- Always Research Your Market: Of course, you will have to take a closer look at your audience to know how to appeal to it. Make sure you study your potential customers very well and don’t miss the smallest detail.
- Translate Correctly: Do not rely on machine translation or unqualified interpreters. The translation is the heart of localization and more than 55% of your campaign’s success may depend on proper translation. There’s a number of resources online to help you choose best-certified translation services only.
- Develop A Glossary: Having a website translated is great, but your main aim is to localize. Sometimes, the words sound better and more familiar in another language when translated in a very specific way. In order not to redo the research work every time, simply note the best variant for translating a certain word in a certain context.
- Adapt Culturally: While this was already pointed out as one of the crucial elements of localization, it is worthy to underline the cultural appropriateness of your content. Do not just make your content sound or look cool, ensure that it does not look weird or otherwise inappropriate for the audiences. To put it simply, research as deeply as possible.
- Localize Visual Content: Localizing the text of your website is an obvious thing, yet, localizing such content as images or videos on your webpage can be a very cool thing to consider. You can redesign your logo or involve a local celebrity in your video ad for maximum effect.
- Don’t Forget About The Website Organization: Organizing your website visually, so that your potential customers would not get lost is as important as any of the previous points. Remember that a member of your potential audience might sometimes get to the original version of your website using Google search first. In order to not lose his or her attention and interest, make the language choice options as convenient and apparent as possible.
- Target As Locally As Possible: Do not just localize your website for the country as a whole. At times, it can make as much job as mere translation. While studying your market, consider which region of the country might use your website better. Research your market in each or at least the biggest areas. Then, target the regions with the greatest need in your offer. For instance, instead of localizing the website for Spain overall, you can localize it for Andalusia or Catalonia, using the corresponding dialects and we will localize the Matchbox website for St. Louis, MO.
- Use The Local Specialist: Aim for hiring only a specialist living in your target area. Such a translator or localizer will certainly know what to do to attract your potential customers as he or she could be one of them just as easily.
- Test Before You Launch: Of course, having somebody evaluate your website before it goes running is a good idea. Just as with local translators, you can gather a focus group that would test your website and tells you if anything is wrong.
- Localize Your Social Media Too: Linking your website to social media is a great move that will certainly boost your traffic. Keep in mind though that some countries have different popular social networks and not everybody is actively using Facebook. There are tons of local networks to consider, such as Telegram in Russia and Eastern Europe, Sina Weibo in China, or Cyworld in South Korea.
Think Big But Act Smaller
Localizing your website is certainly a great idea, yet, it might require some effort at first. Being a
rather complex process, localization allows you to boost the potential of your website in all possible directions. While there is a number of things to consider when adjusting your site to the local audiences’ perceptions, the tips provided above will certainly work for an effective start.
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