If you are running a successful business in your home country then you
are likely to already have a good website. It seems to be just one of those
naturally important ingredients these days and an essential aspect of
marketing. It is a whole new ball game when you start thinking of expanding
overseas. Suddenly, your well crafted website and all your marketing strategy
has to be adapted for a different audience.
It’s no good just using one of those translation websites that are so
easily found on the internet these days. Your slick and professional website
will just seem amateurish and clumsy. It’s worth investing in professional translation services to
convert your website so it can reach out to the hearts and minds and pockets of
your new overseas market(s). So, here are few tips that can be used when
translating your already successful retail website.
Tip#1 Good multilingual SEO to boost your online presence
Especially if you are reaching out to a new market where you are
unlikely to have any previous street credibility or presence as a high street
retailer, you have to use the internet to attract customers. That means making
use of successful SEO strategies to boost your search engine rankings. However,
there is now an added twist to the way your SEO was crafted beforehand. It all
has to be done in another, possibly more than one other, language. And it’s not
just a question of translating perfectly all the slogans and information you
used in your own native language. What is your intended market? What are their
age, gender, cultural preferences and personalities? All this counts because it
needs to be embedded in the use of key words and key phrases used in a successful SEO strategy.
Tip#2 First impressions count
New customers will judge the way your website looks and how it is
translated into the language they understand best quite quickly so it is
crucial that you use marketing
translation services that have an understanding of the target culture and
have sufficient in depth knowledge to avoid simple translation mistakes that
put buyers off. You still won’t sell any of your products unless that is what
the people browsing your website are looking for, but you certainly need to
catch their interest before you reel them in.
Tip#3 Getting those product descriptions right
Good website localisation has to walk a fairly narrow path between, on
the one hand, providing sufficient information about your product to interest
potential buyers in their own language and at the same time attempting to avoid
repetition and too many similar sounding descriptions that your competitors
use. Search engines now make this a very unprofitable route to take.
Tip#4 Provide good back up support in the local language
Ongoing support for your products is
important. Many potential buyers are keen on the idea that a company can
provide a back up service and of course it has to be in their own language.
This means that your relationship with the translation services company you choose to translate your website will be a long term one.
