With the necessity of having an online presence today, starting a website is a must when you think about doing business. With more than 55% of the world currently having access to the internet, an online presence is more than just a reasonable thing to consider if you really want to boost your audience. Yet, with so many people around the world being scattered throughout many different countries, you cannot have your website oriented for just one country. That is where the website localization enters the game.
10 Tips to Get Your Website Localized
It might seem that in order to reach your global audience, you need to only create a website and then just translate it. Yet, this is very far from the truth. In order to properly gather and constantly sustain your audience, you need to localize your website, which is a much more complex but is also more rewarding. In order to localize the website, you need not only to translate its content, but also adapt to the cultural norms of your audiences, considering the currency, culture, geographical and dialect specifics, as well as many more things. Yet, how to handle such a complex task? Here’s a couple of pieces of advice that will come in handy when talking about localization.
1) Plan ahead. Whenever you start thinking about creating a website for your business, make sure you consider its localization someday. This will allow you to build a website that will not be extraordinarily hard to localize in the first place.
2) Learn your audience. Knowing who you are about to localize your website is not enough. You must know those people and, more importantly, know how to appeal to them. Learn the local culture and popular trends within the country, up to researching local memes. All of that will be helpful during the localization for sure.
3) Develop a glossary. As you have studied your local audience and its vocabulary, note all of that down and organize the information. This will allow you to avoid future re-investigations and localize much faster.
4) Localize your SEO. Having your website optimized for the search engine is always a good idea. And having your localized website optimized is at least twice as good. The internet follows the rule that the heavier the traffic the bigger the success, so localizing the SEO elements of your website is a very important thing to consider.
5) Get the right people. Obviously, in order to complete such a task, you’ll need professional help of perhaps one of the best language translation services The Word Point. The best way to localize any kind of content is by making the native speaker from your target country to work for you.
6) Use technology wisely. Some may say that using machine translation for localization is extremely inefficient and should not be done at all costs. Others will say absolutely the opposite. Yet, the truth lies in the middle. While you want some of the bits of your website’s content translated by the software, such a work has to be reviewed and edited by the human professional anyway.
7) Localize all types of content. Just localizing the text on your website is obviously not enough. Localizing both visual and audio content is also a great idea, albeit it might be somewhat costly.
8) Make sure you localize properly from a technical standpoint. Languages are extremely diverse and not all of them use the Latin alphabet, obviously. This is where you have to make sure that your localized website uses the right language, which is properly encoded in accordance with the Unicode Standards.
9) Make your interface convenient. As you localize and optimize properly for your audience, your consumer might get into a situation when he or she gets to the, say, the original version of your website, not in his or her original language. This is where you have to make sure that switching language versions of your site is as easy as it can be.
10) Test before the full launch. As you’re done, make sure to complete a test run for the focus group before you fully publish your website in order to gather all feedback you need and make all adjustments where necessary.
Conclusion: Localizing is Not an Easy Feat
But it is totally worth it. As you make your website appealing and relatable to your audience, consider you’ve succeeded in your target country. With your website localized, your customers will perceive you as something close, familiar, and reliable. Hence, you both attract new customers and be able to make them loyal much faster. Although localization is not the easiest task and it requires a lot of resources and effort, if done properly, it returns extraordinarily well.
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Mark seeks only for the freshest and the trendiest news in education, work, traveling, and lifestyle. With every new day, Mark tries to get only the best of all that for you. Follow Mark on his adventures and see what he has to offer!
