Frederick Jace
Website is the first thing businesses would normally build to show the world that they have arrived. It is like your true brand representation, no matter how many brick-and-mortar shops you already own. However, in today’s highly intense competitive environment, you can’t do without localizing your website in the regions that you’re targeting. Modern businesses find it easy to step into global markets, but making their space in the global landscape is hard.
It is time for businesses to take their website translation and localization more seriously to smoothly tap into foreign markets. By building a multilingual website you can expand your brand reach to millions of people around the globe. We have provided step-by-step guidelines in this article that you can follow to effectively manage your website localization project.
Seven-Step Guidelines for Website Localization
Define Localization Strategy
Unless you have a robust localization strategy in place, you can’t really align your original brand personality with modified versions of the website. For strategy building, you have to pay attention to conducting detailed marketing research and understanding more about your target customers. At this point, you also need to make a very clear sense of your brand’s unique tone and style. So, you can instruct your translators about how you want your website content translations to sound. You must also set the KPIs to measure the overall outcomes of strategy in terms of foreign sales, engagement, and ROI.
Start With Internationalization
Once you have developed a fine strategy for your website localization, it’s time for project execution. It must start with internationalization (i18n) only. If you want your localization to go smoothly, you must build your website on i18n principles. An internationalized website is much easier to localize because there are no hard-coded elements. Moreover, translators don’t have to spend time extracting the content from the original code for translations. Similarly, the job of developers also gets very easy and less time-consuming with internationalized websites. So, the purpose of i18n is to make your website ready for localization from the beginning.
Find Expert Translators
It’s time to assemble your team of translators carefully because translations play a critical role in creating a multilingual website. Make sure to hire professional linguists with expensive experience in your business domain. Moreover, your translator should be native or have near-native expertise. It will help you generate culture-appropriate translations that are aligned with the original source text. To find a translator, you can look up job portals, social media, and freelance sites.
Local Keyword Research
Doing local SEO is also an important part of website localization because unless you have some visibility in a foreign marketplace, the whole purpose of localization is lost. For this, you need to conduct separate keyword research for every target region. Depending on the local keywords and search phrases, you can instruct your translators to incorporate local keywords in the translations replacing the old ones. It allows you to sustain your rankings on search engines in all regions so more customers can engage with you.
Work Through a Localization Management Platform
Managing a website localization project is quite complicated and troublesome, especially if you are using a traditional way to do it. You can invest in a reliable translation project management system that will help you optimize your translation workflow and automate everyday translation management operations. It will support your translators to work on translation tasks seamlessly, having access to all the resources in one place. Using advanced TMS tools will make it very simple and easy for you to manage your website localization. Moreover, you can also effectively manage your remote teams using such professional tools.
Localized UX and UI
Localization is a wide topic and goes way beyond translations. The aim of localization is to create a personalized online brand experience for your overseas customers based on their local culture and the languages that they speak. You have to focus on the UX and UI design of your website as well and modify it in a way that will look appealing to target audiences. Make sure all your UI elements on the website are in harmony with the updated content, and nothing is overlapping. Similarly, for a better user experience, you have to focus on modifying the formatting, navigations, and payment methods that are more familiar to your customers.
Use Data Analytics to Measure Quality
Localization is a continuous process and you have to constantly keep a check on how things are going. For this, you can use a data analytics tool that also comes with professional localization management platform. These tools will allow you to see the real-time performance of your website after localizing it for foreign markets. It will also help you figure out what is working for your website and where you need to make some improvements.
Conclusion
Website localization is very critical to your global business success. You must have the right tools and resources in place to effectively go about your website localization processes. Moreover, following the guidelines in this article will also be helpful to create a robust strategy and execute your localization plan successfully.
