If there is one lesson all businesses can learn from the pandemic, it would be the importance of the global market to the sustainability of their businesses.
“The Internet connects computers. Language connects people.” – Bytelevel.com
While the internet connects businesses to consumers globally
Language provides the next crucial level of connection. It connects people.
The pandemic has reiterated and confirmed the importance of online presence. It has changed the perspective of many businesses and with it, their way of conducting business. Businesses are forced to look beyond their domestic markets for survival.
Bytelevel research recently published the 2021 Web Globalization Report Card highlighted the top 25 global websites. These websites have one thing in common: they are all multilingual sites.
The report confirmed that over the years, the average number of languages supported by these global websites have increased from an average of 12 in 2005 to 33 in 2020.
For example, Facebook now supports 111 languages from an initial 2 in 2005, while Apple started with 18 languages, now covering 35 languages. Generally, these global websites doubled the languages supported over the years.
To reach out to the global market, an online presence is only the beginning. You need to have an international website that will appeal to diverse audiences and convince them to buy from you.
What can you do to reach out to your global audiences?
Start with your existing website
As visitors to your website often navigate across the different locales and pages, it is thus important to ensure a certain level of consistency in your website across the board to avoid confusion.
Ensure that your website can support not just desktop display but also mobile, tablet and other popular devices.
To accommodate a multilingual website, your website infrastructure must be ready for internationalization.
Create a multilingual website
Your global website needs to speak to them in their language.
By having a multilingual website, you extend your global reach immediately. Visitors to your site can choose to view your website in a language most familiar to them. This not only facilitates marketing communication but also has the psychological impact of drawing your brand closer to your global audience.
Create a website that accepts multiple payment method and multiple currencies
With online shopping becoming more prevalent globally, making it more convenient for people to pay using different payment methods and in different currencies will not only enhance their online shopping experience on your website but will also encourage purchases.
Create a Multi-Regional Website
Include not just a translated version of the main website but also supporting it with locally generated content such as blogs, country-specific products, or services, and using different marketing strategies to target various demographics.
Multilingual SEO ready website and local domain
Your international website must be able multilingual SEO ready by adding multilingual SEO tags and localized keywords to ensure that your content will be found by your new markets.
Do take note that other generic top-level domains such as .net, .biz, .info, etc, and country-specific top-level domains such as .uk, .sg, .cn, etc, that can be popular in their specific regions.
Above is an abstract from an informative article from Lingua Technologies International, an ISO 17100 certified translation and localization company based in Singapore with more than 20 years of experience helping companies reach out to their international market through translation.
You can read the complete article here: What are the best practices of a Global Website? – Translation Singapore
To localize your website, you can either put together a localization team to handle the localization of your website internally or you can choose to work with a reputable translation and localization company. Whichever way you choose to go, you must do it with the ultimate purpose of enhancing user experience of your global audiences and speak to them in their language.
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