Improving Your Website Localisation Efforts To Break Into Global Markets

If you’ve ever encountered an unfortunate spelling error on either a brochure or ecommerce website, you’ll no doubt have wondered whether those examples of poor grammar are a reflection on the quality of the site’s services or products.

Spelling and grammar are a massive trust signal and shouldn’t be taken lightly. The smallest of errors can drive potential customers to competitors, and the same can be said for localisation. Recent research from the Common Sense Advisory suggests that 72 per cent of global internet users spend the majority of their time visiting websites presented in their native languages.

Perhaps more notably, 56 per cent say that getting information in their own language is more important than the price of the product or service. Not only does website localisation open your business up to the majority of the global online population, you’re building essential trust signals which have the ability to trump higher prices than your competitors.

Breaking Into Global Markets

By breaking down language barriers, your business can appeal to previously untapped global markets, using potential customer’s native languages to increase credibility and improve customer relations. You’re showing potential overseas customers they’re equally as important to you as those native to your business location/country of origin. Handling information and transactions with the native languages of your overseas customers also reassures them that should they have any issues, your business is both approachable and reliable.

Embracing a localised, multilingual website paves the way for increased overseas enquiries and revenue too, potentially leading to the reimbursement of translation costs in a relatively short period of time. As the above research shows, people are willing to spend a little extra in order to deal with businesses that speak their language.

Getting Started

Before you go ahead and get your website translated, you need to analyse your traffic sources to determine where your visitors are coming from, or in which countries you wish to improve your efforts. This can be done using Google Analytics or other tracking software and is highly recommended before going ahead with localisation services.

As you’d expect, English is the most popular language used online, according to Statista, with 26 per cent. This is closely followed by Chinese, with 21.5 per cent, and then Spanish, at 7.5 per cent. You may wish to consider these major languages when considering localising your website.

Website Localisation at Alexika

Alexika’s team of expert translators is on hand to offer the highest quality, human translations for your website. Regardless of your website’s CMS, we work alongside the most robust technology with enterprise level support and the highest levels of security.

Our team can translate almost any language, so get in touch today to discuss your website localisation requirements with our team.

Categories: General

View other blog posts from: Jan, 2016