Website Localization: When? Why? How?

If you are working with international clients, localization is not just important for your business, it’s a necessity. But to invest money and time to localize your website, you should consider some points:

• When you should consider localizing your website?

• What language your website will be localized to?

• To use machine translation or human translation services?

You shouldn’t start the process of localizing your website without getting answers to these questions. We know that localization is a complicated task but it’s a rewarding one as well, so through this blog, we will help you to get some answers to the above questions.

The Right Timing

Business owners are always thinking when to consider to localize their website, will be it done after a year or 10 years of incorporating the business?! A really confusing question. So you need to know while you are planning your business strategy when you should think about your website localization and when you will be capable of supporting clients from a different country. Also, those clients might have different time zones so you need to have resources to support them. So you should make sure you have the budget and the staff who can help you. Put all of this into consideration while deciding when exactly to localize your website, will make your decision worthy.

The Right Language

According to the Linguistic Society of America, there are 6,909 languages in the world, so you need to decide which languages to focus on. We all know that English is the most common language all over the world but what about the other languages speakers who use the internet. According to Internet World Stats, there are 4 billion daily internet users, 25% are English speakers only.

To foreshorten your choices to which language to localize your website, you can consider the below:

• Your website’s analytics to see from where you have the most visitors. For example, if you got a lot of traffic from France, so you should consider localizing your website to the French language.

• Keyword research for specific countries to see if your products or services are needed or not. By doing this, you can discover a new market with promising potentials to consider it for your next move.

• The final step is to do market research to know more about the cultural or the social side of this language and region, this will help in terms of pictures, layouts, images…etc.

The Right Partner

With thousands of companies offering localization services to multiple languages, the most raised question will be “How do I choose the right partner for my localization needs?” I believe there is no role model answer for this question. Each business is a different case that has its own requests, market segment and industry that will affect the decision of which localization company you should choose. But there are key elements you have to make sure that your localization partner has:

• Quality

Imagine localizing your website and provide poor quality to your audience, so your goal to reach to this market will significantly fail and your time and effort will be wasted.

• Technology

You should make sure that your localization partner has all the needed technology tools that meet your requirements. For example, your website files should be compatible with the partner’s tools to avoid converting them manually to be translated.

• Flexibility

Your localization partner should be flexible and able to support your requirements and to get back to your inquiries.

There are other important factors should be taken into consideration such as:

• Price

• Experience in your industry.

• Time zone.

• Service offered like mobile app localization, document translation and DTP.

Benefits of Website Localization

• Target a larger audience. Localization opens your site up to people who would otherwise not be able to use it.

• Improve SEO and create localized SEO campaigns. You can create a unique URL for each localized version of your site, for instance, which can boost their rankings.

• Increase your conversions. Users are more likely to convert if your site is in a language they’re fluent in.

• Make your site more accessible. You’ll make it much easier for those who have a limited-to-no understanding of your site’s primary language to read and absorb your content.