If you are looking to market and sell your services and goods to other markets, you need to develop and maintain strong and meaningful relationships with the customers you have around the world. Website localisation is one of the best ways to achieve this, as it involves speaking their language to help them learn about you and understand your brand.
A large percentage of internet users who were surveyed said the information provided in their language played a pivotal role in whether they bought a product or service or not. As a result, it’s important to localise various versions of your site for different areas.
We’re sorry but that means you may have to completely rewrite your site each time you grow and start operating in a new country and market. More is necessary than just translating word for word. You need to consider units of measurement, currencies and the visuals – and if they must be changed along with the content in general.
Localising a website offers great returns on investment as it can help you to cater to a large array of customers, improves and strengthens awareness of your brand and generates more income and revenues. One other thing it boosts is SEO – but only when this is done right!
Choose Conveniently Structured URL Formats
You can influence your SEO if you carefully choose the best domain for the localised pages. The 3 main options open to you are:
- Top-Level Domains
- Subdomains
- Subfolders
Although many consider subfolders to be the best for SEO, there’s no real catch-all solution.
Generally bigger brands like Coca-Cola, Toyota and Mcdonald’s use top-level domains for their promotion in local foreign markets. While lots of smaller businesses and brands use subfolders and subdomains to achieve high ranks in local searches. It depends on your history and target market.
Build Up Local Backlinks
If your site is fully optimised in English, you will understand the importance of backlinks. The rule is just the same if you are trying to create new pages, you need those backlinks. However, to rank in local search engines, you need locally sourced links.
Read More:
5 Tips to Avoid with Your Multilingual SEO
Optimise the Speed of Your Site for Localised Webpages
When you are trying to rank better in search engines, page and site speed is vital. Almost half of all internet users expect pages to load within a few seconds. The speed of a site is dependent on various factors, such as unnecessary CSS, overcrowded HTML, a multitude of ads, plugins, visuals and the host you’re using.
Work to Rank on Local Keywords to Help Establish an SEO Strategy for Specific Languages
Google is always working on and updating its algorithms to produce better results on its pages. The new AI understands the content better and analyses the meanings behind the keywords you are targeting. While people still use keywords to look for your services or products, it’s still an important part of SEO.
However, different countries use different keywords. A good example of this is the difference between Australians and Brits looking for car hire and Americans looking for car rental. In countries where English isn’t the main language, you will find there are various ways of looking for information online. You need to utilise the expertise of local SEO individuals to research keywords for your localised content for new countries.
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