Why online localisation is a little like the cakes at your local bakery!

What is website localisation?

Website localisation (or localization) is a process whereby a website is built or adapted to suit a specific geographic area. If you think about this in real life terms with physical shops or business, it may help to make more sense of it.

As an example, let’s say a baker sets up a cake shop in Dublin. The owner speaks English, as most of her customers also do, and she bakes cakes that are suited to local tastes and contain ingredients she can source locally. Her business does very well and she decides to move to a sunny Spanish island and set up shop there instead, leaving someone else in charge of her Dublin business. She uses the same model. She speaks English, she bakes the same cakes. Though her business struggles. Why? Well because her customers speak Spanish, not English, her cakes don’t suit local preferences and tastes and some of her ingredients aren’t available locally, so she’s spending money importing them from other places. Lastly, she’s never changed the time on her watch, so she’s operating at Irish business hours and not taking the siesta and late meal times into account!

When it comes to website localisation, you need to take as many elements into consideration, though the specific ingredients and recipes may vary from business to business. But if you want to sell to a Spanish speaking market, you’ll need to speak their language. If you’re selling products, you’re going to need to be able to deliver products to them in a reasonable amount of time and at a reasonable cost. And you’ll need to be able to respond to orders and offer customer support at times that make sense to your new customers.

Translation Services for Global SEO

Another elements that comes into play online is that most customers will find (or at least you hope they will) through search engines like Google. In each market, Google prioritises local results – websites offered in the native tongue and with elements that prove the site is local – such as integrated maps and local business directories pointing to or linking back to the site.

In order to make sure the language is local and also suited in tone to your target market, you’ll need to enlist the services of professional translators who also have a basic understanding of SEO or can take advice from your digital marketing consultant on the phrases that may need to be used.

Expand your business online by getting a quote for professional translation today. You can get a quick quote here >

Read Part One if you missed it >

Read Part Two if you missed it >

1. Logging in to Google Analytics and Basic Info

Log in to Google Analytics here, using the gmail address and password you or your developer used to set up the analytics account and then click on the name of your site to begin to delve into the wealth of information now available to you.

Basic info will be presented when you click in. This info related to the last month, you’ll see the dates for the data shown in the top right hand corner and you can click on this to adjust to give you information for different time periods as well as to compare one time frame to another.

Below, you’ll be shown the number of visits for this time period, the number of unique visitors, the number of pages on your site viewed, average number of pages viewed per visit, average duration of visits, the bounce rate and the percentage of new visitors. This offer a good overall idea of the traffic on your site, how relevant it is to visitors that find it and how deeply they’re engaging with your content.

2. Where are your website visitors?

It can be helpful to know where your website visitors are coming from. Perhaps you’ve been getting a lot of traffic from the UK or US but you don’t offer shipping of your products to these territories. If you’ve a high volume of traffic coming from there, this might be a good indicator that it will benefit your business to serve these countries better or make it more obvious that you ship to them. It also might indicate that it’s necessary to offer a local version of your site for these countries with content written in their language to help build trust in your brand or product and make what you’re selling clear and compelling.

On the right hand side, click on ‘Geo’ listed below ‘Audience’ and then select ‘Location’ to see how many visitors are coming to your site from which countries.

3. What are your visitors interested in?

Also under ‘Audience’ in your left hand sidebar is a section called ‘Visitor Flow’. This will show you the pages of your site that a visitor first landed on, and the pages they clicked through, on your website, after viewing the initial page they came across. This can give you a good idea of the information people are interested in or details they’re trying to find out. It might indicate that you need to make your contact details easier to find or that you need to simplify something like a shopping cart process if you’re running an ecommerce store.

4. Organic SEO

Organic SEO is a process whereby you use the words or phrases people will be typing into Google to find services or products like yours. For example, if you sell designer shoes for women, you’ll probably incorporate these words and variations of them in the text, images and videos etc. on your site. This use of relevant words helps Google to know what your website is about. To check what your site is appearing in search results for, click on ‘Acquisition’, select ‘Keywords’ and then click on ‘Organic’ to see how traffic is coming across your site in search engines like Google at the moment.

You’ll have accessed similar information within your Webmaster Tools account but as this data can vary between these two tools, it’s good to check up on both. Are your surprised at the words and phrases people are searching and arriving at your website for? Are they bringing in relevant traffic? If not, make a plan for how to incorporate more phrases and words into your site that will make it obvious, but not overly so, to Google what you provide or offer. If you use the same phrase too many times however, Google may decide you’re ‘spammy’, so keep changing it up.

5. Explore

Don’t be afraid to click in and out of the various other sections too. If you know your business well and want to understand more about your audience, you’ll have an idea of the sort of information, unique to your business, that will help you plan ahead better, increase traffic and increase sales or leads.

Analytics doesn’t control or manage any parts of your site, so you don’t have to be worried about impacting your website by clicking on the wrong things. Be curious, explore and find out what’s going to most benefit you.

Let us know what you find most useful about Google Analytics in the comments below. Did it help you generate more sales or encourage you to translate your website into the language of a top visiting country? Let us know more and good luck with your exploration!

4. Your Dashboard and A Tech Check

Log in to Webmaster Tools using the gmail account you used to set it up and click on the link for the site you’re going to be checking up on. Keep in mind, if you have more than one website you’d like to monitor – such as a French version of your site and Russian language version to some large target non-English speaking markets, you can add these here and monitor them in the same way.

You’ll be taken to a ‘dashboard’ as shown below where you can navigate to the different information now available to you.

Here, you’ll also see Crawl Errors, Search Queries and Sitemaps. If you see any errors, let your web developer know and ask their advice and let them know you’d also like them to submit the sitemap for each of your websites – this helps Google recognise all available pages of your website and index them accordingly for search results.

5. How are people finding your site?

Click in to ‘Search Traffic’ on the left hand side and select ‘Search Queries’ for more detailed info. You’ll be shown a graph that maps how many times your site has shown up in search results. Below this, you’ll see a very useful list of the words or phrases people have typed into Google, that brought your site up along with data related to these searches.

Impressions: This is how many times your site has ‘shown up’ in Google for that search term.

Clicks: How many people have clicked on that impression.

CTR: Click through rate – the percentage of impressions that were clicked on, taking a searcher to your site.

Avg. Position: This is your average position in Google. Number 1 being the best you can do. The first page of results will be one to ten, so you can gauge approximately what page you’re showing up on using that. Google always has ten results per page.

Using this data. Are your search terms relevant to you and the services you provide? If not, you might need to look at all of the copy (or writing/information) on your site and edit it, making sure to use the kinds of words and language potential customers will be looking for. If you’re click through rate is low, but impressions are high, you may need to look at how to edit the Meta Title and Meta Description for your web pages and blog posts. This is the little heading and description that show up in Google – make them enticing!

6. What does Google think your website is about?

Next, click on ‘Google Index’ on the left and select ‘Content Keywords’. You’ll be shown the top 20 words that Google sees as most relevant to your website. If you have a French language website to target French customers, these of course, should all be French – or mostly! Have you been writing blog posts in English and relying on people using Google Translate to figure out what it says? That might not be doing your SEO for that particular market any good. Look at incorporating more of the words and language you’re customers use and speak.

Using this data. Put together a list of the words and phrases you imagine your customers will be using to find a service or product like yours. Enlist the help of a professional translator if you need these to appeal to countries overseas. Add these terms into your website content – on your home page info, about us page etc. and begin to incorporatee them into the titles and main copy of blog posts. Carry this out for a few weeks and then check back in with Webmaster Tools to see how much of an effect it’s having.

You can find part one of this series here >

And in part three, we’ll look at some more useful information you can find easily in Google Analytics.

Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics may look large and confusing when you first dip into them, but if you know what you need to look for, they both become a lot easier to navigate and dig out the gems of knowledge you’ll need either to pat yourself on the back for your great success, or begin adapting and changing.

1. Get yourself set up

First, here’s a little video to explain to you what it does!

Webmaster Tools is pretty easy to sign up for, pop along to here and follow their simple instructions to register your website as yours. You will have to verify that the site is yours by copying and pasting some information given by them, into your own site, but they’ll offer examples of how. If it’s beyond your capabilities, not to worry. The company or person who built your website should be able to do this easily.

Google Analytics can be a little harder to set up, so ask your developer or web design company to set that up for you and pass the login details for both on to you. They can set it up using your own gmail address and password to connect it easily to your other accounts.

2. The Waiting Game

Both Webmaster Tools and Analytics will need some time to begin collecting data. Webmaster Tools will begin collecting information already available, such as keywords the tool sees as relevant to your site. While Analytics will need a bit more time to find out things like who is linking to your site and traffic levels. Analytics won’t collect traffic info from the past, only from the initial set up date of the Analytics account.

3. Crossover

You’ll see a lot of crossover information between these two platforms but there are items that are only available in one or the other, which is why it’s valuable to still use both. Also, there can be information that differs. I imagine that this is due to so much data being collected and averaged out and differing timeframes, that there will be some slight differences in calculations.

Check back in a fortnight for part two of the series, at this point you should even have some data available to you in your brand new monitoring tools.

If you’d like to enquire about professional translation for your website, visit our main site instantranslation.ie

What is content marketing?

Content refers to, well ‘stuff’! Content is text, like these paragraphs here, images, video, diagrams, infographics, music etc. Anything that gives information, is content. A website empty of content is just a framework and domain name – not very interesting. Content is what brings a site, a blog, your business and your social marketing strategy to life online. And because it’s what brings it to life, you should plan it all in line with your brand and do it often. Supermarkets don’t buy beautiful fresh vegetables and then never buy anymore. They buy them on a daily basis so the supermarket is always full of fresh, healthy goods. Likewise, you can and should do the same with the content on your blog.

How can I implement a content marketing strategy?

1. Think about your brand, products and services.

What do you provide? Your content, if it’s going to help your online marketing, will need to relate to this. You can pick niche, varied and unique angles, but keep it in line with what you’re providing most of the time. A cute cat picture or excellent quote every no and again will do no harm.

2. Consider your audience.

Who are you trying to reach? Write and choose content that matches with what your target market will be interested in. If you sell expensive designer jeans, there’s no point in writing blog posts about ‘cheap’ or ‘free’ jeans or clothing. Even if these are keywords that are searched a lot, they’re going to attract the wrong traffic. Be faithful to your services. If it’s designer, write about the designers, the quality and give your customer a feel for your great, top notch, online customer service. Reinforce that with beautiful packaging, on time deliveries and kind returns policies to create loyal customers who want to shop with you again.

3. Consider where your audience are.

Online, there are two ways you need to think about this. Firstly, what platforms or spaces does your audience ‘hang out’ in? If you’re a B2B organisation, people you’re targeting could well be doing their homework and research through mediums like LinkedIn and possibly twitter. If you’re providing something young fashionistas are going to be interested in, make sure you are providing content they love where they are – Pinterest, Instagram and probably twitter.

Secondly, think about where these potential new customers of yours are geographically. If they’re English speakers, make sure your site and related content is in English -and that counts for your social media and other platforms too. If they’re Russian speakers, translate your content into Russian or indeed set up a Russian site specifically for these customers. Do they same for the languages of any other markets you’re targeting too and implement these handy steps to make the localisation efforts work even harder for you.

4. Be ready to snap!

When I say be ready to snap, I don’t mean lose the plot, don’t worry. I mean be ready to take a great photo, capture a video or record an impromptu interview. It will help to have a smartphone with a decent camera and pictures really enhance and attract customers, even if your content isn;t necessarily visual. If you own a bakery, snap the fresh bread out of the oven in the mornings. Ask a customer can you take a little video of them telling you what they love about your cakes! Think about what you’d like to see from businesses you love or don’t know much about that and provide that content to your customer.

If your business is more B2B, go to conferences, corporate meetings, networking events etc. ready to take photos and tweet interesting facts, new developments etc. Get someone else to take pictures of you with members of other businesses and organisations and get them onto twitter. Make sure to include the other company’s twitter handle so that they know it’s their and can retweet it to boost your exposure.

Have you seen any really excellent content strategies or ideas online? Share your experiences – good or bad, in the comments below. If we can help, we’ll provide or direct you to some other tips that might help.

Of their most used tools is Google Maps and search engine/smart phone users are making use of this more and more frequently to find out everything from where a businesses is located to reading reviews and checking opening hours. It’s also a good way to let Google now where you are. The closer a smartphone user is to your location, the more likely you are to show up in the ‘Business results’ on a Google search and also on a maps search for services or products.

What’s more is it’s easy to do. And if you have more than one premises, nationally or internationally, you can set your location at each of these places. Do you have a collection point for products you ship abroad for customers? By utilising that address, you can put yourself on the map there too and help boost your international rankings.

How To Put Your Business on the Map in 2014

1. Firstly you’ll need a Google account or gmail address, if you haven’t got one already. You can sign up here.

2. Next, go to Google Places/Businesses here and sign in using your gmail address and password.

3. You’ll be taken to the page shown below. Read and agree to the terms and conditions to continue.

4.  Next, search for your business to see if it’s already listed.

5. If your business is not listed, click on ‘No, these are not my business’ to continue. If your business is listed, click into it to claim it and add to/edit information already there.

6. Add all of the details you are happy to display publicly, and submit.

7. You’ll then be told the address will need to be verified. Google do this by posting out a pin number you to activate your online business listing. This can take up to two weeks. In the mean time, you can still click through to edit the information that will be shown when the pin arrives and you can activate it.

8. Add your details. Make sure to describe your business clearly in the description section. Use language and terms that your potential customers understand and are likely to type when searching for a business like yours. You can also add photos and opening hours. Adding opening hours is incredibly important as it’s one of the top things people search for in relation to businesses! Especially shops and services that require a physical visit.

9. In one to two weeks when your pin arrives, log back in, using the same steps at the beginning. Your details will all be saved, but you can now use the ‘Verify’ option and pin to make your listing go live. It can take some time for Google to review and it begin to appear, but it’s worth it.

10. If you have other business locations, you can add these too, within the same Google account/gmail address, as long as you can verify each by receiving post at that address.

Top Tip: If you’re listing your business in non English speaking countries, make sure you have your description and business details translated professionally. If a web user is searching for a business in a hurry, they will be more inclined to click on one they can actually understand!

It’s also a good time to look at expanding into French markets if you haven’t already done so. A report from ComScore earlier this year reported that it is the third largest ecommerce market in Europe.

If you do decide to go ahead with targeting non-English speaking countries, language is going to be your biggest barrier but if you go about everything the right way, it can also become one of your greatest tools and set you ahead of the game.

Firstly, it’s a good idea to set up a local site. Many international sites offer different websites for different countries. This allows you to better target your products, establish your website in local online territories to help you rank higher locally and enables you to speak to your customer in their mother tongue.

It may shock you to know that Google is not the biggest search engine in Russia. Yandex, a Russian search engine actually holds 60% of the market. So while you may be a Google SEO expert here, you’ll need to do your research to find what the priorities are for Yandex.

In France, search engine choices are similar to here, but it’s likely that your potential customers will be searching in French and using French Google – www.google.fr. This will be operating in the same way as Google.com or Google.ie in many technical ways, but will prioritise French hosted sites, French domain names (.fr, similar to the Irish .ie) and sites in the French language.

A basic translation of your website will help. There is no doubt about that. It will help customers find your site. However, when they land on the home page and product pages, you need to not only be speaking their language, but capturing their imagination, holding their attention and giving them reasons to trust you. Would you buy products from a site that had a poor command of the English language? I wouldn’t. Something about it feels less than secure and makes me not want to enter my credit card details. There’s no reason that other customers won’t feel the same.

A great translator with an understanding of marketing, sales and local cultural nuances can work with you to ensure these needs are all tailored to professionally.

If you’re going to do something, make sure you do it right. Check out the great infographic below from Search Laboratory for more information on Russian ecommerce to help you along the way.

Their online, instant translation application ‘Google Translate’ offers some quick convenience for less important translations on-the-go, but they’ve now specifically advised that this isn’t good enough for professional translation needs; such as App language translation and business website translation.

One of their most recent announcements tackled the subject of translation for App development directly. They’re offering a professional translations service to Android developers to make sure applications on offer are available and understood by a greater audience. While we would advise shopping locally for your professional translation services, some of the stats they revealed just how necessary translation is for the web and for apps. The global audience is there, you just need to tap into it.

Google claims that over 1.5 million new Android phones and tablets around the world are turned on for the first time every day.

“Each newly activated Android device is an opportunity for you as a developer to gain a new user, but frequently, that user speaks a different language from you.”

- Google’s Android Developer Blog

According to the blog post, a game developer used professional translation services along with local marketing campaigns and the results showed that a whopping 80% of installs were non-English speakers. I would deduce that if your company can target a global audience, similar could be said for your website – if you get the translation right.

Enquire about professional translation in Dublin >

As YouTube is owned by Google, you can create a YouTube account using your Google credentials or log in details and link them together. While this can make signing up easier, it’s beneficial in a whole different way when it comes to SEO for your business.

Google has various search categories. In a general search, a user will be doing what’s termed a ‘web search’ – i.e. searching the web in general. Users of the search engine can also choose to search Images, Video, News, Books, Blogs and more.

As Google has developed over the years, they’ve noticed that not everyone specifically clicks the different category search options – so they came up with a solution. Instead of just showing ‘Web’ search results for general searches, Google will also add in News, Images and Video to these general results. This very often includes video results from YouTube. Utilising a YouTube account means you have another area in which to incorporate information on your business, tips for customers etc. that add another level to the possibility of being found by potential customers using Google to search for products and services.

Producing video has become a lot more inexpensive over the last decade, but most companies don’t have money to spend on creating their videos in the wide variety of languages their international customers may speak and understand.

Hiring an interpreter or translator that is also suitable to narrate your corporate video in numerous languages may not be an option. A cost effective way to overcome this is to simply add subtitles and offer the same video numerous times with the various languages.

This also allows you to add the surrounding information – such as video title and description in the language each video is focussed at which can really widen your international SEO and help bring up your overall traffic and rankings. Taking English out of the equation, some of the most spoken languages in the world include Mandarin, Hindustani, Spanish and Russian.

To enlist the low cost solution of professional translation for subtitles, visit Instant Translation and ENquire for a quote now >

If you missed it, read 10 SEO Tips Anyone Can Incorporate Part 1 here >

6. Share on Social Media

Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are not the answer to all of your marketing needs, but they have become an important part of it. It’s a good idea to have a presence for your business on each of them, and the ones you use the most will depend on who you’re targeting. For example, Facebook can be better for reaching consumers while LinkedIn may be better for B2B promotion and connecting.

If a customer can’t locate your business when using a search engine, they may turn to Facebook or Twitter next, so be there waiting for them.

Social media sites are also a great place to share links to your blog, pictures of events or related news stories and it’s likely that all of this contributes to your SEO. Changes that Google implemented this summer mean customer satisfaction is even more important than ever. Ask for reviews and feedback through your networks to help let Google know just how great your business is.

7. Work with Others

Start Ups and small businesses can do well from working together and you probably know at least one or two other people running their own business or getting their start up off the ground too. Try working together to help promote each other so each of you can reach new clients and customers. Suggest each of you posts something to Facebook about the other, mentions them on Twitter or retweet each other from time to time and include a blog post on their services. Talk about what’s unique or great about each others business, or what your experience of them has been and come up with special offer to further entice new business.

8. List your Business with Google

With the rise of the Smartphone, more and more people turn to Google to find a service locally. Google for Business or Google Places, is a feature that allows you to put your business on the map, literally! While it will mostly appear to people who are searching for local offerings, it can benefit your overall Global SEO too. It’s just another way to let Google know what you’re doing and where you are.

Make sure to ask customers and friends to rate and review your business listing here to help it rank even better.

9. Use Video

Video becomes less expensive all the time and it’s a great way to capture the message and spirit of your business and engage an audience. Keep it short and focus on one aspect of your business or one special offer per video clip. Upload it to YouTube and ask your developer to embed it into your business website also. Make sure the title and description use words and language that potential customers might be typing in order to find you.

Keep in mind that while Google translate offers some functionality for translating websites, it can’t translate video. If you’re targeting a worldwide audience, upload a few versions of your video with subtitles in different languages. Hire a professional translator to make sure these are perfect. Bad communication sends the wrong message.

10. Be Unique

Every business needs a USP. That’s nothing new. But keep it in mind when working on your online marketing  and SEO too. You need to stand out from the crowd. Use what is specific or unique to your product or service. At the beginning, this may not gain you huge amounts of traffic, but if you can rank well for very specific results, over time, this can help bring other rankings up. If it increases your traffic at all and customers leave satisfied, it has a knock on or ripple effect that becomes more beneficial over time.

If you have any questions about International SEO or Professional Translation Services, simply get in touch. We’d be happy to help.

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