If you are here, you probably have a website. It might not have such a big audience as Amazon has, but it does its job. New visitors come now and then, generating sales and informing people about your services. The English version works quite well, even for foreign visitors.
But one day, you stumble upon a statistic that makes you think you might have been missing something: about 80% of clients say they would pay more for a product or service if a brand offers a customer experience in their native language. So, you suddenly realize how many opportunities you’ve already missed.
Not to miss, even more, it’s a great idea to look for website localization services. Localizing websites is a huge opportunity for brands to tap into new foreign markets and win big in these new regions.
Here is a website localization tutorial covering the essential steps to make content adaptation fast and easy for your company. These localization steps will help you create a multilingual site that will look native and convert your website visitors into customers.
1. Define languages and regions
One of the first things to do before localizing a website is to understand where your audience comes from. You need to know the region your potential clients live in and the language they speak.
You can get audience insights by using special tools, such as Pulsar. Such tools will give you information on key audience segments and what drives people.
Also, consider running ads in different regions and audiences, comparing what segment liked your product the most.
Deep market research will help to find your buying personas in various regions.
- Is your product interesting for this specific market?
- What is the competition level in this market?
- What are their buying habits?
- Can locals afford your services/products?
- Would you need to hire additional customer support managers?
The answers to these questions will make it clearer whether you need to expand to this market or not.
2. Think of SEO
Well-done SEO is one of the things that makes a general website an outstanding one. A lot of marketers state that SEO generates more leads than any other marketing initiative. What’s more, Mike Lieberman for @Mike2Marketing said that 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search engines, making SEO an essential part of a top-notch website.
To do SEO localization, you need to understand how clients search for your product and what search terms they use. SEO is quite tricky as you might think that people speaking the same language use the exact words. But it’s not 100% true: for example, in the USA, people use the word “auto”, while in the UK, “car” is used.
To optimize your website in SEO terms, you need to include keywords, different for every region, in your localized versions. Compare SEO rankings for keywords in other languages and choose the ones that are more likely to perform better.
Moreover, it’s important not only how people search but also where they search. Google is not the only search engine used in the world. For instance, if you’re planning to go to the Chinese market, you need to look for Baidu and make your website visible there.
3. Internationalization
Internationalization is what makes your website ready for localization. Internationalization is more about the technical side of localization as it ensures that the code is written in a way to makes it possible to adapt content fast and easily without huge technical changes.
While doing localization, encode your content in Unicode (UTF-8). It is a character encoding that supports special characters used in all world languages. So, all the specific symbols in different languages will be shown correctly, and users won’t see any squares instead of letters.
Another critical point is the choice of fonts for a multilingual site. Not all default fonts support both Cyrillic and Latin simultaneously, not to mention hieroglyphics. This is especially true for designer fonts developed specifically for your project. Therefore, before using a font on your website, you should ensure that it supports the Unicode standard.
Internationalization should also cover:
- Possibility to resize the text without ruining the overall design
- Support of bidirectional text
- Support of various date, time, currency, and number formats and removing hardcoding of dates and currencies
- Leaving enough space for content in other languages
Internationalization makes it easier to localize websites without changing code and any technical stuff.
4. Website design and layout
Website design can’t be the same for every locale. Various regions have different visual preferences. Thus, during localization, you might need to change some visuals, change color schemes or even redesign the UI completely for certain regions.
An English sentence is 20-30% shorter than a Russian or German one. Chinese and Korean are even more concise. This should be taken into account when creating a site layout. For example, use relative values instead of absolute ones, leave some space in interface elements, and generally follow adaptive design principles.
Here is an interesting fact about website layout. People usually read in an F-shaped pattern, meaning the left side gets more attention from them. However, in some countries, people read right to the left so that the right part will be in the center of attention. Thus, you can’t use the same layout as it wouldn’t match the cultural code of the foreign audience.
Also, changing the images is needed to make your website more native and local. If you use any photos, try to use those with local models so that users can relate themselves to the people in the pictures.
5. Choose localization team
The professional localization team is already 95% of your success. You have several options: you might hire freelancers, an internal team, or go for a professional website localization services agency. Many businesses choose agencies as they have vast experience translating projects in various domains.
Another interesting option is to go for human translation API. All you need is to incorporate API into your project, and then the process becomes almost automated. Human translation API is great for projects where you need to add new texts constantly, like on e-commerce websites or travel aggregators. Moreover, it’s a cheaper option than hiring an entire localization team if you’re short on your budget.
6. Marketing materials
Even when you’re done with localizing the website’s texts, you still have some jobs to do. It’s localizing your marketing materials for a foreign region. How will people get to know about your products if you don’t advertise in their native language?
Adapt all the messages you want to share on social media or in the ads, so the locals in the new market get a chance to know about your project. Also, you can consider partnering with local bloggers, so they share the info about your product with their audience.
Marketing localization doesn’t only include translating the ads or adapting the ads’ visuals for a new market. You also need to consider how purchasing habits and consumer behavior differ in a new market.
Wrapping Up
Localization is not an easy task. However, it should become a priority if you want people to talk about you worldwide. Make website localization an integral part of your product development process, and you’ll see how your website can rock.