Every business, regardless of size, should consider the bigger picture of attracting an international clientele rather than limiting its website and product to a US-based audience only. As your company grows—and isn’t that the goal?—so, too, will the demand from your customers, which is why it’s important to ensure your website is primed and optimized for international success.
Expertly translated website services, along with optimization, will not only ensure a global reach and increased customer base, but it will also improve customer satisfaction across the board and boost sales.
In this article, we’re going to review the importance of website optimization along with strategies you can begin implementing today.
Analyze traffic
Before diving into the content, it’s always a good idea to first analyze the current traffic to your website and see what regions of the globe are visiting your site. This kind of research and analysis is key to developing a business strategy to optimize your website for international customers and will generally point you in the right direction.
When you analyze traffic data to your site using popular online data analytic tools such as Google Analytics, you can see what content is engaging what audience, which will help you move forward in your optimization strategy.
It’s all about that sweet SEO
Search Engine Optimization—or SEO—is paramount to tapping into an international market, so plan out a strategy that will open up your product to a global audience.
One key strategy in optimizing your website for international customers is incorporating multinational content. Some websites offer a language option and even multiple international pages to ensure customers’ needs are met and content is delivered in their language.
If your business offers services that are the same regardless of geographical location, focusing on offering multiple languages is a good plan, and there might not even be a need to present different content.
An example of this would be a software company providing solutions to a global market. To provide the same service to anyone in the world, they’ll want to ensure their content is available in any language. So, they would have one single website but with multi-language content versions and SEO strategies in place to increase their site’s rankings.
Here is what some of these tactics might look like for such a business:
- A generic top-level domain (www.examplewebsite.com as opposed to www.examplewebsite.us)
- One website that uses language-distinct subfolders (www.examplewebsite.com/fr for French content or www.examplewebsite.com/jp for Japanese content)
- Links from related language-specific sites
- The use of an international Content Delivery Network, or CDN, to ensure fast website speeds anywhere in the world
Translation Services
Translating your website into multiple languages takes time and careful consideration and should be conducted by a team of translation experts to ensure there are no errors. Once your business establishes a budget to allot to this piece of website optimization, here are a few things you’ll want to consider next:
- What pieces of the site will be translated?
- Your website will benefit from translating things like SEO keywords, embedded content, alt tags, etc.
- Set up a timeline for the website translation and a review or editing process
- Use an expert or bilingual team member to review the content
- Establish a plan for testing before the translated content is available to real users
Bottom Line
There are endless ways you can tackle website optimization for international customers. While it can seem overwhelming at first, the key is to do your diligent research, establish a budget, and hire the right professionals who have an understanding of SEO, multi-language tactics, and translation services, in general, to ensure you’re hitting the mark.
At the end of the day, there are plenty of web optimization strategies you can approach on your own, but when it comes to optimization for a global market, it pays off to receive professional input. Establish your budget today, set a timeline, and get started on transforming your website.
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