Tips to take your website global

know a very effective way of marketing? You guessed it: it is your website. Think of your website as your e-business card. It has replaced the traditional paper business card (although paper business cards still can add some style and flair to a businessperson’s repertoire, not to mention that they can still be useful as well).

In taking your website global, there are multiple considerations you should keep in mind.

The first point is the language. Is your website going to be translated into many different languages? How will you standardize this across those different languages? How will you make sure you are getting the highest quality from each language services provider who is providing a translation for the source (original) language?

The second involves the actual nuts and bolts of the website. Will the website default to a certain language if a user is located on a certain part of the globe? For example, if a user accesses my webpage from Argentina, will the content on the website automatically default to being in Spanish? Fortunately, there are ways that web developers can use to make your website default to a certain language if a user is located in a certain region or country.

A third consideration is, as James Riddle says in his article, “10 Steps to Building a Successful Multilingual Website”, on the website G2, is your “domain strategy.” In Riddle’s words, “There are two ways you can build a multilingual website: through a subdomain approach or a separate domain approach. That means you can either have a single website domain with other-language linked pages or use separate domains to host the multilingual versions of your content.” That information is useful in that it helps creators of multilingual websites decide what approach to use.

A further consideration with the domain strategy, in my view, incorporates your brand’s visibility and size. Of course, if your company is a very large one, you will likely need separate domain names for each segment of your company’s business. In other words, you would need a domain name for Argentina, a domain name for Spain, a domain name for Russia, a domain name for China, et cetera.

But if your business is smaller or is just starting out in the marketplace, you might consider other strategies, such as having a web developer include a hyperlink that says the name of the customer’s native language on the webpage. This hyperlink, once clicked on, would show the entire contents of your business’s webpage in that customer’s native language.

Of course, if you are attempting to do business globally, you will need employees to answer questions in those languages in which you are doing business. This is sometimes overlooked. In the rush to expand to new markets, businesses sometimes do not consider that they need staff with sufficient training to respond to customers’ inquiries. For example, if you have a “contact us” form on your multilingual webpage, be prepared to respond to customer inquiries in each language that you service. This will ensure that every customer feels good about your business operations. It will also help you close more sales.

In any event, localization services can help your business’s efforts in creating a global website. They can help because they tailor each segment of your business’s webpage to the local market. The purpose of a multilingual website can be to conduct more targeted marketing. Thus, if you are attempting to market more effectively on the global stage, adapting your multilingual website to given segments of the world is an absolute necessity.

Future Group, an expert language services business, can help with these needs, whether they are to fine-tune your business’s strategy with regard to language on a multilingual webpage, to localize content to a specific market, and a wide range of other services related to the industry.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is also a hugely important concept when taking your website global. In a nutshell, SEO makes your website come up more frequently in user searches on major search engines. There is a catch, however. Businesses usually like to have their webpage come up for the right customers. What does that mean? It means that you want your multilingual SEO and content translation to target the customers who are actually willing to buy your product or service. This is part of what makes SEO so tricky. SEO is tricky because you cannot always guess what a potential customer is going to think to search. But our best attempts at figuring out what our potential customers want is a good start towards the direction of acquiring new clients globally.

So, how does SEO relate to taking your website global? It relates because you must put keywords on your webpage in every language you wish to service with your website. For example, if your business sells coffee mugs, and you wish to take it to the Spanish-speaking market, you must not only put “coffee mugs” in your keywords on the webpage. You must also put “tazas de café” in the keywords (among other keywords, but you get my point).

Also, when creating a multilingual website, you will sometimes want to make the different pages in the different language. That will make the experience more user-friendly for potential customers and customers alike in different countries. For example, on the Spanish language website, instead of saying, “Home page,” you would want to say, “Página de inicio,” or just, “Inicio.” This practice will help you ensure a good customer experience on your website that is streamlined in order to maximize your chances of making a sale. 

This brings me to my next point, which is that you should hire people who know the languages involved in your multilingual website. This may seem obvious, but hiring a web developer who speaks the language for which you are trying to create a webpage is important. That is because this web developer who speaks this language (and ideally speaks your language, too) can help you iron out problems with the multilingual content as well as helping you with the technical aspects of the webpage (not to mention the aesthetic aspects of the webpage, too). 

Having written content in a multilingual fashion, your website should be able to achieve the following things.

For one, it will attract customers from the country in which you operate. Say that you operate a business primarily out of the United States, yet you also have operations in Mexico, Canada, and Argentina. In this scenario, you will want to have content in English, Spanish, and potentially French, depending on whether you operate in Quebec. In this example, there is the obvious notion, which is that you will reach clients who are in a different country from that country in which you operate. That means that you, as a business owner in the United States, will reach customers in Mexico and Argentina via Spanish, and you will reach customers in Canada in English and potentially French. However, there is a less obvious significance to this notion. You have now, by creating a multilingual website, opened up to customers located in each of these countries who speak foreign languages. Say, for example, that there is a Spanish speaker in your home country (in this case, the United States) who wants to buy your service or product. But the website, before you made it multilingual, did not appeal to this customer. In the event that you do make your content multilingual (i.e., in Spanish, for this customer), then you have created a method of gaining new business in your home country. The same can be said for the other operating languages of your business.

In this article, we have covered the main points as to things to consider when taking your website global. Another last point is that your multilingual website ought to be better than machine translation could make it. 

The solution to this is to invest in a high-value and professional multilingual translations agency. Of course, the cost should not be prohibitively high, but making sure you invest your time, effort, and money in a quality translation is important.

Think of the end impression for a customer who searches for your site on Google or another major search engine. You will want this customer to have the impression that your business cares about quality. 

Machine translation can be a good solution for certain types of texts, and certainly should not be ruled out as a translation tool. But making a multilingual website requires a lot of forethought, consideration, and care. This means that machine translation may not be suited well for this type of translation. Indeed, there are good machine translation services, but human translation is usually better than a machine.

Regardless, whatever method you use to translate your website, you will want to make sure it reaches the target audience in whatever form that you think is best for reaching those potential customers. Of course, this is easier said than done, but taking these tips into account and researching your market will make it a lot simpler.