Arthur Wilson
If you're creating a new website and are planning to attract customers or clients from around the world, then you need to think about how you're going to cater for international site visitors.
There are a number of things to consider. Data laws in different countries, privacy laws, shipping costs just to name a few.
But have you considered the language you're going to present to your customers?
Here's a look at five big benefits of taking the time to properly translate your website.
How many times have you visited a website in a foreign language where the only option to make it readable to yourself is by clicking Google's 'translate this page' pop-up? It's better than nothing, but I bet there were plenty of grammatical errors and odd word choices when the translated version of the page loaded!
Trying to translate your website on the cheap or leaving it to the user's search engine to sort out will result in errors that will muddy your sales messaging.
One of the key reasons why accuracy in translations matter is because of trust.
Now, say that an automatically-translated website was an e-commerce site. Would you trust your card details (and generally actually receiving the item purchased) to a website that is full of grammatical errors?
Having properly translated pages reduces the chance that a user will abandon a checkout process or bounce straight away because they can't quite trust what they're reading.
If you want to attract international customers, then you need to get your website in front of them! By translating your website into different languages especially on dedicated subfolders (for example, yourwebsite.com/fr/votre-site-web), you're expanding the countries and search languages your website can rank in. An international translation company with experience in web and digital can help you with this and setting up your site in a way that works for both people and search engines.
Making changes to your website to accommodate various language translations is a big task and it can mess with the structure of your site.
It's far better to do this work earlier on in the lifespan of your website and essentially make a bet with yourself that, even if it's not massively relevant now as your target audience may be local, it will be of benefit in the future.
A translated website increases the likelihood that international visitors will buy from your site.
In fact, this research from Common Sense Advisory found that over 72% of online consumers would be more likely to buy a product if information about the product was in their native language.
