Localizing your website should be a big part of your plan for marketing in other countries. Suppose you want to build good relationships with customers online. In that case, you must ensure that your message is clear and easy to understand.
Website localization is the process of adapting website content to meet your target market’s linguistic and cultural needs. This lets brands capture the human connection users look for when browsing the web in their native language. In addition, your brand will have a better chance of getting the trust and respect of the people you want to reach in the market.
In this article, we will not only talk about why you should localize your website and essential things you need to think about
Images
After you have taken care of your words, it is also essential not to forget about your pictures. If you use automated translation technology, text in images, subtitles, or embedded text will not be localized automatically. This problem is easy to avoid, however. You can remove all text from your pictures or save them as SVG files so your localization team can translate them easily.
Content Creation
There is not just one way to do it when localizing a website. To get the message across about what your brand stands for, you should think carefully about localizing your content. Relationship-building content, primarily editorial, blog content and marketing emails may need extra things like copywriting in more than one language. This ensures that your unique way of telling stories and tone of voice stays the same while ensuring that your site is optimized for local search engines.
Website localization comes with a lot of multilingual SEO work. You will need an effective multilingual SEO strategy to get people to visit your website and boost sales in your chosen market.
Cultural Sensitivity
We have talked about how important it is to localize your website to adapt your brand to different cultures. Still, you also need to invest in cultural sensitivity as a standard operational practice to make sure you keep connecting with relevant consumers to their cultures.
Cultural sensitivity is awareness of cultural factors that can affect how you run your business, market your brand to customers, and even build relationships. Suppose you want to stay relevant to national consumers and add value to your brand. In that case, you need to understand the cultural differences of your audience in each market. This will help an online user to easily navigate with a good user experience, help in creating marketing messages, and create valuable products and services for local consumers.
Translation Technology
Suppose you’re feeling overwhelmed by all of these steps. In that case, you’re not alone: localizing websites can be a slow and complicated process. There are many platforms out there that can help automate and speed up the localization process, which is a good thing.
Creating and building a global website is more accessible and cheaper if you choose a website localization partner that can use the best translation and automation technologies.