Your website is your most important marketing tool. Whether you have a simple leaflet site that highlights your services, a full ecommerce platform that sells a variety of products, or anything in between, your website is generally where a future client or customer will make their first impressions of your business – and first impressions matter!
The design and functionality of your site is important, but the content is critical. Not only does well-written content help you with search engine optimisation, but great content draws in the reader and excites them about purchasing your products or services. And if you are an international business then making sure your content can be understood by all your clients and customers around the world means using a website translation services to convert your words into their languages.
Not everyone speaks English
Whilst English may be the most widely used and understood language in the world, billions of people cannot understand it. If your business is looking to expand in China, India, South America, or various other parts of the world then whilst having your site default to English it could seriously improve your sales if you also offered your website in the local language, whether that is Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, or anything else. And even better if you manage to automatically switch between languages based on a user’s IP address and geographic location.
Localisation builds trust
Simply translating your site into another language is a huge step up in terms of making your company accessible to a wider and more global audience, but where translation really shines is through localisation. A direct translation is good, but a translation company can go further and localise your content with idioms and phrases that only a local would say. Global companies can seem distant, but localising your content can make your company ‘feel local’ even if it is based thousands of miles away, and to many people local = trustworthy.
Local SEO
It can be a significant investment to pay skilled copywriters to produce language-specific content for each localised version of your website, but that content will have the dual benefit of exciting both readers and search engine bots. Each localised version of your site can compete in localised search results, which means that for each language you translate your site into you have an extra bite at search engine traffic – it’s a whole new SEO market.
Legal clarity
Most of the copy on your website will be there to engage users and stimulate search engine spiders, but you will also likely have some documents, such as terms of service and policy details, where clarity is what matters. An automated Google translate of these documents could leave you in legal hot water if you find yourself ever needing to rely on them, so make sure they are translated by a reliable and trusted translation partner to avoid problems in the future.
Image by Mohamed Hassan