Article - Building a Website for Global Success By Christian Arno, Lingo24

Building a Website for Global Success

Christian Arno, Lingo24 - Search Engine Optimization 0 Comments | Add Yours

About The Author:

Christian Arno is founder of Lingo24, an international translation services provider that specializes in website localization and multilingual marketing. With operations on four continents and clients in over sixty countries, Lingo24 had a turnover of over $6M USD in 2009. Follow us on Twitter: @Lingo24.

The international language of money

Many businesses have been hard-hit by the global economic downturn. The reaction of business owners has been key to them sinking or swimming in the domestic marketplace. Although, it’s perhaps a lack of reaction that has caused so many companies to fold.

The problem has been two-fold. Banks haven’t been lending companies money which is vital to businesses cash-flow, and customers have been tightening their purse strings too. This leaves business owners with not a great deal of options: they can either cross their fingers and hope for the best, or they can proactively seek out new business in untapped or emerging markets.

The latter ‘proactive’ option can be daunting. Language is one of the last remaining barriers in creating a true global village, and for those not blessed with fluency in several languages, it can be easy to dismiss the whole notion of ‘going global’. But the need to be forward thinking is paramount.

Language and the web

In the European Union, German is the most widely spoken native tongue, with almost a fifth of the EU population speaking it natively. But English is the most widely spoken tongue in total, with around half of the EU population speaking English as a first or second language. In the US, over 80% of people speak English as a native language. For this reason, whether you’re marketing to Europe or the US, it can be tempting to distribute your communications in English only.

But the world is a much bigger place than the EU or the US. Only a quarter of the world’s population speak English, 94% of whom do so as a second language.

From an online perspective, English is still the dominant language in terms of content, but over half of all Google searches are in a language other than English. This figure is likely to rise as online populations grow far quicker in foreign language-speaking emerging markets such as China and Russia, than in the west.

Furthermore, Asia accounts for over 40% of the world’s internet users and China has 30% more internet users than the US. Research has also shown that internet users are four times more likely to buy from a website in their native language. The bottom line is that people prefer to communicate in their own language, regardless of how many languages they speak.

Go ‘local’

With that in mind, the first step any businesses should take towards targeting new business abroad is to fully localize its website. First though, there’s the issue of which new markets to target – the world, after all, is a very big place.

Brazil, Russia, India and China are collectively known as the BRIC countries and are usually grouped together as examples of fast growing developing economies. It may, therefore, be a good idea to start with the BRIC countries, but the countries you target will ultimately depend on what your service offering is.

The most cost-effective way of establishing your target markets abroad is by searching online. Check to see if there are similar businesses already operating in the market – and try to find as much information on them as possible: How long have they been in business? What is their turnover? Where do they export to? Also, check what services they offer, if there are clear gaps in their offering, you can then show up on the scene and exploit these gaps.

It’s worth pointing out that if there is an abundance of similar companies already operating in a certain country, it may be difficult to gain a foothold. Too much competition can make things very difficult for new companies that aren’t familiar with the local ways.

With a list of key target countries, you can then set about establishing an online presence in these areas, which requires a two-step process: localization and optimization.

You need to translate and localize your website not only into a country’s language, but its specific dialect too. The French spoken in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada is largely the same, but there are enough key differences to merit treating each country as a separate entity from a linguistic perspective.

The same applies for the Spanish spoken in Spain and between all the Latin American countries. Whilst it’s also worth considering the differences between UK and US English, as there are many colloquialisms that are unique to each country.

Design and domains

The website localization process should begin at the initial design phase. Even if there is no immediate intention to adapt a website for international markets, there are measures designers can take to help make the process run as smoothly as possible later on.

For example, UTF-8 is a character encoding for Unicode that can be used with over ninety scripts (written languages), and is compatible with over a hundred thousand characters. Designing a website with Unicode basically means that non-English alphabets are well catered for should a translation be required further down the line. Most of the common web design tools such as Dreamweaver facilitate Unicode.

Other factors worth considering are colors (different colors can mean different things between cultures), fonts (common fonts such as Arial will be displayed on most screens) and even the domain: it’s always best to use in-country domains for each of your foreign language websites, rather than a sub-domain of your domestic website. The in-country website should also be hosted on a server based in the target country, as Google uses this information when establishing search engine rankings.

Multilingual SEO

Once you’ve localized your website, you’ll need to optimize it: that is, you need to ensure your site ranks as highly as possible on Google and other search engines.

If you already rank high on Google in your domestic country, that’s great. But you shouldn’t translate your key search terms directly into the target language – even a professional translator won’t know what keywords people use to search for products/services locally. A direct translation doesn’t take into account abbreviations, synonyms or colloquialisms. In short, you must research the keywords for each target country and then incorporate these into your translated website.

The fact that English dominates the Web in terms of content, but most of the world’s internet users are native speakers of a language other than English, raises a rather important point from an SEO perspective. Because there is less competition for key search phrases on the foreign language web businesses should – in theory, at least – find that they rise quicker in foreign search engines than they do on Google.co.uk or Google.com.

The cost of localizing a website for international markets isn’t substantial, especially when you consider the implications of not acting to combat the effects of the recession. Companies need to proactively seek out new business and to do so, they have to speak the language of target market.

Lingo24 would be happy to dicuss your needs in more detail. Please contact us!