One of the biggest challenges facing any business these days is being found. The internet puts the world at everyone’s fingertips, so making your business stand out from all the others is difficult.
We’ve been doing work in this area for some clients recently, helping them to expand their online presence beyond the UK, to reach global markets more effectively. I wanted to share some thoughts about the best ways of making it work.
It’s no longer simply a case of translating the text of your site into other languages. There’s a lot to be said for building entirely new, separate microsites to reach each target international market.
That’s because the text of a site isn’t the only aspect that search engines (many of them, not just Google) look at when they evaluate a site for placing in their databases.
Search analysis bots will also look at the site structure, at the text used to describe page content, at the location of the server that hosts the site. The more local the hosting, the better the search performance result.
Generally speaking, there are fewer non-English sites (although that balance is changing). That in itself improves the chances for one site to stand out.
Of course, translating the site text is important too. People are far more likely to buy from a site they can read in their first language. There are cultural differences to learn from, too. Sometimes, direct translation may not be enough, because specific terminology might be different.
In a Daily Telegraph article earlier this year, a UK company exporting to the US pointed out that it made the effort to “translate” business-specific terms for use on its US site, simply because while the language is technically the same, the terminology in the two markets is different.
