5 Effective Steps to Successful Website Localization
5 Ways to Achieve Successful Website Localization
If you have decided to go global with your business, then localizing a website according to the needs and peculiarities of a target market will be essential for bringing your company success abroad. Keep reading, as in the article below, you will find out how to do it efficiently to achieve set business goals in the future.
Benefits of Website Localization
Before we tackle a detailed guide on how to localize a website effectively, let’s understand why it’s important to do it in the first place. Here are the main benefits of the localization of the business website:
- Raised brand awareness
With proper localization, more people would be able to find out about your brand, company, business selling products, or services.
- Increased conversions
People are more likely to purchase from a website in their native language even if they are fluent in English. So, localization will help you convert more customers.
- Wider reach
After website localization, you will be able to reach the audience who otherwise would not be able to understand your content easily.
Tips on How to Localize a Website Effectively
Here are 5 explained steps that will help you localize your website successfully and take your business on a global scale to generate bigger revenue.
Avoid Automated Translation
It’s of paramount importance to steer clear of automated translation tools and turn for help to professional services like www.translate.com/localization as they have professionals on board who have extensive experience in website localization.
Solely translating the website to another foreign language is not effective at all. It’s also necessary to adjust the content according to cultural differences to avoid any potential troubles with understanding what’s written on a page. Also, it helps to eliminate the lexical ambiguity completely, so that any kind of misunderstanding won’t occur.
Unlike automatic translation, the localization process involves digging deeper into all cultural distinctions. It assists in tailoring the content in the way that the targeted international audience perceives all the information better and is more likely to make a purchase.
An experienced specialist will do some research and will adjust all content accordingly to increase your chances for success. They will convey the message you want to deliver in the most appropriate manner while minding all local language peculiarities.
Choose Universal Payment Gateway
If you want to expand your e-commerce business, then choosing a universal payment gateway that accepts all the variety of international currencies is also a must to enter the international market smoothly. Adjusting currency is as important as adjusting website language. Before entering the global market, make sure that your payment gateway enables accepting most currencies from all over the world in order not to miss potential clients.
The most popular online payment platforms like PayPal accept almost all international currencies, so implementing this payment method for your website is obligatory. Also, research the local market to find out their preferred payment methods and then develop your website according to people’s needs.
Adjust Website Design
The next step will be to adjust the visual part of your website, including the overall design, colors, and images. For example, Chinese people read vertically, and the Arabic audience reads right-to-left. So, you have to take these crucial details into account for a successful expansion. Therefore, adjusting web design, in some cases, will be inevitable.
Colors you use on your web pages also matter. It will be required to research color meanings for your target country and make some appropriate changes if needed to avoid any controversy. Same goes with images. Make sure they look good and are appropriate for an audience.
Targeted Search Engine Optimization
To make everything work for you, it’s paramount to take care of SEO activities and make it also targeted to a specific foreign market. You will have to come up with a separate SEO strategy that will work for each international audience. It’s not about translating keywords, but it’s more about doing some extensive research and defining what keywords are most widely used abroad.
Get the help of a local SEO specialist or find the one who is fluent in any language you might need. It will make all efforts more effective and fruitful. Find out what search engine is the most popular in a target country and make relevant adjustments. By adding the right keywords to your targeted content for a certain audience will make you more visible online and will improve your search results so that more people can find out about your business on their local market.
Localization Testing
Testing everything that you have done to go internationally is the last but the most important step that will allow you to identify your strengths and weaknesses. It’s important to see whether everything that you performed for your international audience works properly.
It’s important to perform linguistic testing to make sure all words and sentences sound good and convey the message you wanted to send to a website visitor. It will help to ensure that customers will easily understand the content with no ambiguities.
If you have made some other website changes, then checking it will be very important, too. Core aspects to keep an eye on are currencies, dates, images, shopping cart, payment verification, and completion process as well as page load time. Make sure that currencies are being adjusted automatically and all provided payment options work smoothly so international clients can easily buy from you.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, website localization is an extremely important aspect that you have to take care of if you are thinking of taking your business to the international level. We have also provided some pretty effective tips that will help you make this process smooth and successful for your company so that you can easily conquer foreign markets in the future.