Geo-optimize your website to globalize your business

We’ve all been to our neighborhood Chinese restaurant where the proprietor welcomed us warmly and handed us the menu wishing us an enjoyable meal. Imagine her greeting you in Chinese and handing you a Chinese-only menu. Then when you inquire about the English menu, they respond to you in Chinese. Would you stay? Would you come back again? That may strike you as odd and unlikely to happen. But we do it to our clients all the time.

Today 40% of internet users are from Asia and 26% are from Europe. Within 5 years, roughly 75% of internet users will have a non-English native language. But non-English language web content has not kept pace with international user growth. Last year as an example, Asian content accounted for less than 15% of the total web content.

With e-commerce exploding around the world, offering your products over the web in English-only, when you are selling internationally, is like that restaurant proprietor offering his US clients a Chinese-only menu. So how are global internet users dealing with this bias towards English and does that create a challenge or an opportunity for global companies?

Native Search. Most users today, when searching for information or services online, either search the web in their native language or use English. First, they search in their native language for obvious reasons. After submitting the search, results can be limited and often do not lead to satisfactory information. So they try a search with their varying English skills. When they search in English, their search results are abundant but often confusing as they don’t have the adequate language skill to enter the correct keywords or to understand the found content. So they turn to Machine Translation on Google or Babelfish to automatically translate content into their native language.

Machine Translation. Although Machine Translation can give users the gist of the meaning of the content, the quality is often laughable, embarrassing and, needless to say, frustrating. Global corporations that offer English only content, are losing complete control over brand, image and message when they rely on inadequate machine translation technology to communicate with their international users, clients or prospects.

Think about the message that you will be sending to your potential clients when you refuse to communicate with them in their own language. If they require further support, return the merchandise, or if they are not very satisfied with your product, they will have to communicate their issues to you in your language as opposed to theirs. This will create further complications and frustrations and will quickly terminate repeat business opportunities that most companies depend on.

Search Engine. Furthermore, when you rely on Machine Translation, you forfeit all potential leads generated from organic searches. Prospects that are searching for your services on the web using their own languages will not find you because your keywords in their language are non-existent on the web and therefore cannot be indexed and served by search engine websites like Google, Yahoo or Microsoft.

Solution. By professionally translating the key pages of your website, you will not only regain control over your company’s brand internationally, but you will also improve your global search-engine ranking, increasing your chances to be found on the web and increasing international clients’ loyalty.

The following is the recommended action plan to take:

1. Localize your web pages into the languages for the markets you are selling into. Depending on your global marketing plans, you can decide on the extent of localization to undertake.
2. Optimize your website’s keywords and key-phrases for each strategic geography on the most prominent search-engines. Keywords are the DNA of your website. Don’t rely on machine translation; hire professionals to help you do it right. It is worth every penny you spend.
3. Encourage your local staff to contribute in their native language with press releases, blogs and local events content. International users can then search and find these pages, which will then lead them to the rest of your website and services.

Conclusion. If your company has a global vision, ask yourself these two simple questions: Do all of your target markets understand English? Is your Web site multilingual?

If you answered “no” to both questions, you are not alone. You are just like the majority of the companies that have a presence on the Web. Being able to answer yes is being able to say you have a competitive edge— and that you really have a presence on the World Wide Web.

So, geo-optimize your website to globalize your business. Because after all, the language of business is not English; it is the language of the customer.

Web 2.0 and Localization

Web 2.0 technologies are becoming prevalent everywhere we look on the web. More people are blogging, more are joining social networks, more companies are building online communities, more corporate executives are embracing the potential that Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) and other marketing and sales channels on the web are achieving or promising.

So how will Web 2.0 affect the localization industry? Here are some of the changes that we at GlobalVision International have identified and are taking advantage of.

1. Technologies like XML-APIs, Wikis, RSS and others are becoming more feasible and easier to use with Web 2.0. They are helping facilitate the creation of virtual work-teams and improve communication and collaboration among them. These technologies can be effectively utilized by the localization industry to help simplify project staffing all over the world, help disseminate project information and assets, and improve overall efficiencies. For instance, the ad-hoc process of sending emails back and forth between translators, project managers and the client to answer translation content queries can now be effectively handled via online wikis connected to a SQL database (see gvCollab for more info). Over the long run, those queries and responses will turn into a powerful online knowledge base that help localizers better meet the needs of end-users.

2. Communicating with clients is becoming easier and more transparent as corporate barriers are fading on the Web. With the advent of dynamic websites, blogs and RSS feeds, customers and prospects can stay tuned, or even better yet, get engaged in an industry dialog uncensored by the usual press or corporate public relations filters and gatekeepers. This and other Translation and Localization Blogs are examples of the power of blogs.

3. Winning new clients, local and international, is becoming less costly with Web 2.0. With powerful analytic tools that tie directly into Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Search-Engine-Optimization (SEO) campaigns, marketing decision makers have immediate access to the latest conversion numbers and pertinent statistics. Companies are more willing to experiment with international PPC and Search Engine Geo-Optimization campaigns when they can better gauge and measure their economic impact. RSS feeds are also making it easier for companies to communicate their value propositions directly to their clients and prospects worldwide, thus avoiding the press, snail mail, and email limitations and pitfalls. With Web 2.0, websites no longer serve information locally, and have become a cost-effective two-way communication channel between vendors and clients all over the world.

4. Demand for localization is increasing with Web 2.0. The more blogs, RSS feeds, PPC campaigns, Wiki knowledge bases and increased overall content on the web there are, the more localization requirements will grow. The more web-based communities grow in numbers and size, the more global will their requirements become, and the more localization and translation services will be required. The immensity of the need can be gauged by the growing worldwide demand for translators and localization experts.

Over the past 10 years, it has been Translation Memory that was the leading technology enabler of the localization industry making the most concrete and tangible impact on the industry’s production processes and efficiency. Over the next 10 years, we believe Web 2.0 technologies, particularly the ones facilitating community creation, collaboration, and communication, are the ones that will have the most impact on the localization industry. And this impact will not just be in a production capacity, but in marketing and sales capacities as well.