by guest blogger Claudia Amendola of mtvirtualassistant.com
What’s the key of a successful international website?
Over the past year, many of my clients with international websites have been asking me for an easy and fast way to optimize their sites for each country or the European market. That’s the reason why I wanted to make this post and share with you my thoughts. Please feel free to share yours too by leaving your comments ,-) .
You may know already that an “international” website is a website for an international audience. In order to reach an international audience you will need to Translate and Localize your website in other languages. English is the most common language but that doesn’t mean that everyone on this planet speaks and understand perfectly English. Only 37 percent of the world’s online population speaks English as a first language.
Translate your website in other languages such as Spanish, Italian, French, German ect will assure you a niche of market you will never get if your website is only written in English.
But translating your website is not the only thing you will need to do in order to reach multilingual audiences. Your website needs to be localized. WEBSITE LOCALIZATION is the process of modifying an existing website to make it accessible, usable and culturally suitable to a new target audience. It is a multi-layered process needing both programming expertise and linguistic/cultural knowledge as well as marketing knowledge. If a website is only translated to a different language, the chances to reach a new market are lower.
The website localization process comes normally first. Followed up by the website and content translation. At least this is what I normally do as I prefer to search and focus first on the market and audience niche. It is important to study the right words, the target audience age you are communicating with, the society class as well as your competitors in that particular country. In the majority of cases it is the lack of linguistic and cultural input that lets a website localization down.
Last but not least is: INTERNATIONAL or MULTILINGUAL SEO!
Multilingual SEO is an important component to an effective global Internet marketing strategy. Some search engines are better than others and work differently, too. Google results, for instance, may differ from country to country. Just because you’ve achieved a certain rank for targeted keywords for the U.S. doesn’t mean you’ll achieve the same results for Italy or Spain, for instance.
So, these are some tips you may take in consideration for your multilingual marketing:
- Know Your Audience first
- Modify Web Page Code for your new market
- Choose the right Domain or Domain Extensions
- Always use the Native Language
Claudia Amendola, Multilingual and Travel Virtual Assistant successfully provides an outsourcing alternative for clients who typically do not have the time, space or budget for in-house staff, but have the same need for bilingual and travel assistance. Claudia speaks and writes 3 languages fluently: English, Spanish and Italian. She can be reached at info@mtvirtualassistant.com or on Twitter @italianmtva
For French or German services contact the author of the blog, Sarah Santacroce at sarah@simplicityadmins.com or on Twitter @sarahsantacroce
