Imagine an individual is searching for an online car rental service. He opens your brilliantly-built website having all the requirements he needs.
He skims through the website but leaves without clicking anything.
What do you think happened?
The answer to this is not the presence of alternative services or a flaw in your website design. The potential customer left because he could not understand anything on your website—simply because it was not present in the language that he understood.
This is why it is absolutely necessary to translate your website into a language spoken, or understood, by your target customer. A translated website gets more traffic than a website that is present in only a single language. If you are not translating your website into other languages, you are losing the opportunity for traffic as content translation can be an extremely effective way of drawing in new customers and multiply traffic to your website.
This translation of content on your website might seem like a daunting task to many, but is easier than it looks. We give you some of the tips on how to boost your website traffic rates using content translation.
Explore, explore, explore
When attempting to translate your website, it is always wise to start from a small scale. Don’t rush things when planning to translate your content. Explore where the traffic is coming from. Where does its origins lie?
Go for Google Analytics to find the answer to the above question. Examine your Google Analytics record under the Behavior tab in your record, as it will demonstrate the pathways that your website users usually take when they roam your website. Understanding this would help you to improve your efforts and give you a better feeling of which pages are generally more important.
However, just improving your web pages with respect to the viewers’ preferences isn’t enough. The key is to find out the languages that are the highest drivers of traffic. For example, a little exploration through the Google Analytics will show you from which region most traffic is coming from. Do the rest of the work by exploring the languages spoken in these languages so you can have a better idea of which languages to translate into.
A word of caution here though:
Examining the regions giving you the most traffic is not a foolproof method of identifying the language as country of origin doesn’t necessarily correlate to the language spoken. For example, if you are getting maximum traffic from United States, chances are that the users from this region prefer Spanish over English. Likewise, someone could be from Canada but prefers to browse websites in French instead of in English. The wise approach here is to translate your website in multiple languages to cater to the needs of all audience alike.
Find a good translation partner
The importance of a good translation partner in giving you the “leg-up” in your global journey cannot be undermined. A good and reliable translation partner or agency can be your ultimate tool in exposing you to the outside world and unfamiliar markets. Before embarking on the journey to go global, do some thorough research on a translation agency that has flexibility, quality, and accessibility as its core pillars. Your chosen translation agency should have a reputable image amongst the other companies and should possess a large number of linguists dedicated to translating your content in the language of your customers.
Remember, your chosen translation agency is your link to the millions of customers out there who are awaiting your services but are unable to do so owing to the language incompatibility. Make the choice of choosing your translation partner after a careful research on the quality, timeliness, and accuracy of the previous translated projects so you can be fully prepared to launch your website to appeal to your customers.
Translate Away
Now that you know where your traffic is coming from and you have a good translation agency to ease your work for you, the final step is to go ahead with the translation. After carefully analyzing the languages that you must translate into, dive into the unknown waters with your translation partner to guide you along the way. Be sure to take stock of the content present on your website and understand what “clicks” with your target audience more—is it the blogs that your customers prefer more? If so, which topics appeal most to them? Repost your blogs in the translated languages and make sure to follow-up with an updated post on social media. Translate your social media posts as this would help to establish a trusted “point of contact” with your customers.
Conclusion
Increasing website traffic is no easy task, especially if you are a new entrant in a new market. Translating your website content, however, will prove to lay the foundations to getting increased traffic on your website, particularly from the unexplored, yet lucrative regions.
Remember, there are approximately 1.25 billion websites in the world. How you make your website stand out among these is a real challenge. Take the first step to globalization—translate your website for a greater traffic and increased exposure. This is the key to attaining the global success you want—and much more.