| Is there a demand
for your products or services outside of your domestic market?
If so, how are you marketing to this group of potential customers?
How do you overcome language and cultural barriers? Web Localization,
which is the process of translating your web site into your
customers’ languages and adapting to local markets ? is
an essential step toward establishing a market presence. When
used correctly, it can be a highly cost effective marketing
tool for companies, especially for reaching out to a global
audience. However, it takes careful planning and an understanding
of your customers’ needs to be truly successful with your
web localization efforts.
I have seen companies investing tens of thousands of dollars
on a multilingual web site, only to discover later that it will
cost them so much more to update the content on a regular basis.
In turn, they are left with the site as is, without being able
to update it, or having a real way of measuring the effectiveness
of their expensive experiment. They eventually just feel frustrated
and disappointed.
How do you avoid that? How do you turn global web sites into
a success from day one, and have proof to show your boss (or,
if you are the boss, show it to your self)?
Here are some tips:
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Carefully examine your business needs.
Have a real understanding of where the demand for your product
and services are coming from. Make a list of the countries
that you wish to sell to. It will be much better if you
base your list on real data rather than guessing. Read your
web log to see where your visitors are coming from. Inform
yourself by reading industry publications, and by talking
to analysts to see where the opportunities are.
-
Do keyword research on what phrases people
are using to find you on the Internet. You will be surprised
by what you find. Often times, what keywords people use
in reality, are very different from what we THINK they use.
For example, multilingual desktop publishing is one of our
company’s specialties. Yet, we were not getting very
many hits from the Internet regarding this specialty. Through
keyword research, we found out that customers are actually
using the term “foreign language typesetting”
to search. Since we have updated our web site based on these
findings, customer inquires have more than tripled. A good
place to start is by using Overture’s keyword suggestion
tool. Once you know what your targeted keywords are in the
English language, you can then proceed to make another list
for keywords in the languages that you are localizing into.
You can do that through your in-house resources, or you
can consult a company that is familiar with global search
engine strategies, such as wintranslation.com.
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Apply page optimization techniques to
your localized web text in order to maximize your high ranking
potential on search engines.
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Make sure that all of your pages have
titles. Meta descriptions and Meta keywords are all very
important. Your targeted keywords should appear in the titles
and Meta tags of your pages.
-
Submit to major local search engines
manually.
Most search engines require that you have localized content
to be included in their local search results. Prepare a
well thought-out description of your company and manually
submit your site to various engines and directories. You
should avoid automatic submittal software as your site may
be labeled spam, and therefore banned from search engines
for using such software.
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Maximize online referrals.
Referrals from related sites and portals greatly enhance
your company’s credibility. It also increases the
chances for potential customers to find out about your company.
Therefore, it can be a great investment to set aside time
and money to locate online opportunities for referrals.
It is also a good practice to write up a description in
the local language about your company to be used for such
referrals. You have much more control as to how your company
is described when you write up your own description, rather
than leaving it to other webmasters.
-
Take baby steps before you make any major
investments.
Web localization can be an expensive venture and it is perfectly
OK to take small steps before diving into it full-force.
You can start with one language, or several pages of your
site as a test. Measure the popularity of the localized
pages by carefully examining your web log. By varying the
languages and the text, and watching to see how it changes
your log data, you will have a much better understanding
of where best to put your localization dollar.
-
Keep track of your efforts and measure
success on a continual basis.
Being data-driven is a critical part of making smart business
decisions. Keep a good record of your efforts by documenting
every step; monitor your web log on a weekly, or bi-weekly
basis and measure conversion rates to see how many sales
inquiries turn into actual sales. Write up a monthly report
detailing what is working and what is not. If you can prove
how web localization is helping your organization to increase
sales leads, and make a difference on the bottom line; before
you know it, your boss will be knocking on your door to
give you a bigger budget and more resources!
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56% of small businesses that use the Internet
in the U.S.A. say that the Internet is ESSENTIAL to their business.
Source: CyberDialogue (www.cyberdialogue.com)
Households with Internet access watch TV about 13% less than
those who don't use the Internet. Source: Nielsen Media Research/America
Online (www.nielsenmedia.com)
The number of Internet users will increase to one billion by
2005. Source: Intel (www.intel.com)
Almost half of online shoppers are online-newspaper readers.
Source: Newspaper Association of America (www.naa.com)
Internet users who configure, personalize or register on web
sites are well over twice as likely to buy goods (and/or services)
online. Source: Fletcher Research (www.fletch.co.uk)
According to surveys in 14 major and secondary U.S. markets,
the Web has already surpassed direct mail as an advertising
medium. Source: The Kelsey Group/ConStat, Inc. (www.kelseygroup.com)
Only one-sixth of the Internet is indexed by search engines!
Source: NEC Research Institute (www.neci.nj.nec.com)
Amazon.com was the first e-commerce site to serve 10-million
customers. Source: Amazon.com (www.amazon.com)
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