If you are considering having your website translated and wondering what kind of return you might see on such an investment, here are a few things to keep in mind:
Search engines
If you translate your site into the language of your target market, you increase the likelihood of your website ranking highly in local search results. Search engines tend to prioritize sites in the local language and will rank them more highly. Also, many users will set search criteria to their language, so if your site is not translated, it may not show up at all to those users.
Selling
Research from the indicates that people are as much as six times more likely to purchase from a website that they can read in their native language. In fact, they are often prepared to spend more on a product that offers information in their mother tongue! A report on global consumer buying preferences looked at more than 2,400 consumers from non-English speaking countries and found that over half (52.4%) of those surveyed buy only from websites where the product pages are presented in their own language.
Think about it, would you buy a product from a site that is only in Norwegian, or Farsi? Translating your site into the native language of your target market makes it easy for visitors to navigate your site and stay in the sales funnel all the way to buying, instead of leaving to search for your competitor either because they don’t trust you or because they aren’t able to understand all of the information on your site.
It’s More than Just Web Pages Though …..
Before you take the leap, take a holistic view of localising your company. If you translate your website, but not your support emails or other aspects of your business, you may find yourself alienating that segment of your market. You may not be able to comprehensively localise every aspect of your business right from the beginning, but you can and should manage expectations by letting your visitors and customers know that your customer service or other interactions you have with them are currently only available in English and let them know you are working on changing that.
Read our blog post on localising your business for more information, or give us a call on 0115 871 4994
Photo Credit: Sarah Joy on Flickr