Website localization is the process of adjusting a website to fit the language, culture, preferences, and other aspects of a target region. It allows tailored communication with your audience and builds trust to drive more conversions.
Great website localization wants you to think beyond the site itself. You need to tailor a website that is an essential way of connecting with international audiences. It makes your website ready engage your existing customers and also welcome first-time visitors.
Localizing your website significantly broaden your market reach and brings in customer engagement. So, when you think about how to build a multilingual website with website localization you can make website engaging by making its elements relevant.
What is Website Localization?
Website localization helps in adapting a website to the culture and language of users in a target market. Nowadays, people around the world are more likely to engage and buy from a website that speaks to them in their mother tongue. It involves taking into account language aspects, cultural differences, legal requirements, payment methods, etc and make it according to the market.
According to the research, 65% of consumers prefer information on the website in their own language. So, this makes sense to get the true website localization. With the right localization techniques your business can expand its global reach in a more successful way.
Here’s how website localization proves to be beneficial:
● Enhanced user experience
● Increased customer engagement
● Broader market reach
● Increased conversion rates
● Increased sales and revenue
● Improved SEO and website traffic
● Improved brand reputation
Basics of Website Localization
Various types of businesses go for website localization projects and here are the basics of web content localization that experts follow:
● Adapting Linguistic Aspect: Website localization always ensures that the website’s text and content are genuine and tailored to the market.
● Meeting Cultural Aspect: Localization helps the website to meet the cultural aspects of communication to show understanding.
● Local Communication: There is a need for real translation to make the local addresses, legal notices, and other documents as per the market.
● Making Website Elements Relevant: Some of the major elements such as currency, payment options, addresses, and characters are important to be as per the market.
Steps To Take Your Website Global
Having a good localized website allows your users to navigate your site easily and quickly. Therefore, your website needs to have translated content and use of the appropriate language and terms that resonate with the local customers.
Here are some of the important steps to follow to get the top-notch localization for your website:
1- Plan Things Strategically
You cannot expect to see huge profits in the market if you’re operating in one language. Website localization helps you to not miss out on huge potential profits and expect to see international sales from the new market.
If you’re just setting up your website or updating an existing one, a good localization strategy will give you clarity of purpose to make an actionable plan for expansion. Some aspects you’ll need to consider such as:
● Market potential
● Resource assessment
● Content prioritization
● Ideal target markets
● Localization timeline
● Localization budget
2- Conduct Market Research
As you are working on having a well-planned localization strategy you must conduct market research to have a deep understanding of the markets on your website. Businesses choose fruitful market research translation to figure out various things about their target markets.
You have to identify your international buyer personas and considering the below questions will help you:
● Do you target audience have interest in your products?
● How much competition is there in the market?
● What is the market’s growth rate?
● Are your products affordable?
● What are your audience buying preferences?
3- Have a Dedicated Team
One of the reasons why localization seems to be challenging is because of all the different people involved in handling the project. Working on the website localization project requires a whole team but the entire project is handled by the project manager.
There is a need to know what is localization project manager and about its tasks to understand how project is completed on time. There is a need to choose the right agencies that have expert project manager who can handle team members, such as:
● Native translators
● Web developers
● UX designers
● Linguists experts
● Marketers
● Content writers
● QA testers
4- Better Keyword research
When you’ve decided on your target markets and are about to work on your localization project, it’s a good idea to do some keyword research. Using the relevant international keyword research helps you to get the relevant key phrases to use on your localized website.
This can make sure that your content shows up in relevant searches and ensures:
● Improve in your search engine rankings
● Higher traffic levels
5- Website Internationalization
Internationalization aims to make your website completely ready for localization. It allows the website content to be easily translated into other languages without any technical issues. When you internationalize your website it is important to decouple your translatable content from the source code to make all the language-specific information stored in separate files.
When you need perfect marketing localization, here are some points to consider during website internalization:
● Designing and developing to removes barriers
● Encoding in Unicode (UTF-8) to support the special characters
● Incorporating predefined localization features such as date, time, etc.
6- Localizing the UX and UI
The way you present to make your website have an impact on customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and sales. So, when you’re planning your website localization project you must put in the localization efforts that assured better engagement.
Here are the aspects to work on to enhance the user experience:
● Adapting images, videos, graphics to resonate with the target culture
● Making content fit to suit cultural, religious, and other preferences
● Color scheme adaptation to ensure better cultural meanings
● Maintaining regional content tone
You don’t want to make any localization mistakes and here are a few aspects to consider when enhancing the user interface:
● Using perfect font selection
● Text expansion and contraction
● Improve readability
● Navigation adaptation for right-to-left languages
● Adapt to local format such as time, date, etc
7- Testing
Once you’ve localized every aspect of your website, it’s important to test it thoroughly to leave no errors. Even when you have localization experts, still you need to have good knowledge and understand what is localization testing to know the process. This helps you to ensure that all words are correctly translated and perfectly localized while ensuring no technical issues.
Localization testing involves checking the following aspects during functional testing:
● Image appropriateness
● Hyperlinks
● Encryption algorithms
● Loading time
● Hardware compatibility
● Entry fields
● Names, time, date, etc.
● Broken strings/design
● Shopping cart
● Payment processing
● Downloads
● Upgrades
Localization testing regarding linguistic aspects involves:
● Readability
● Spelling and grammar errors
● Punctuation errors
● Cultural appropriateness
● Untranslated strings
8- Marketing Localized Website
For better marketing, there is a need to ask what is Multilingual SEO to the expert team and how they can help you in that. It helps focus on targeting the languages and dialects your audience speaks. To successfully market your localized website you need to consider how your audience and their purchasing habits and behavior.
To market your website you can work on the following elements.
● Make presence on popular marketing channels
● Use useful and informative content
● Go for calls to action and slogans
● Paid search keywords
How Tridindia Can Help You?
Website localization may seem complex but it is not scary. With the right approach from our side, you can expect to get the results a lot quicker and more efficient than you thought. We have professional experts who know how to deliver powerful website localization solutions to make your business enter the new markets to scale better.
Conclusion
A good website localization solution can take you beyond the site itself and open up the channels to bring in international exposure. We provide website localization solutions and know what aspects to consider making your website discovered by the search results and your target audience. Our experts have years of experience in providing website localization and can assist you to reach new markets where your business will thrive.
If you are interested to know more about us, contact us at +91-8527599523 or quickly send us a instant quote.