Accurate language services
Having a Multilingual website and profiting from language services can do wonders for your bottom line and in case you are wondering what market to penetrate next, here are some helpful tips:
- The most demanded languages for travel and tourism now are Japanese, simplified Chinese, Russian, German and French.
- For E-commerce there are more than one trends and deciding on one market over the other depends on the goal of the merchant, whether the goal is long or short term.
Choosing Nordic languages (Danish translation, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic), French, German, Italian and Spanish can offer faster results, so it is better for the ones with a short term goal in mind.
Merchants that want to be a step ahead and have a long term growth in mind should choose languages from BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and CIVETS (that stands for Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa).
An added bonus for using language services is that SEO and pay per click advertising in these languages cost less.
Who can translate my website and provide SEO as well?
The short answer: it really depends on the provider. Usually, translation companies would translate your website to the language of your target market and will adapt it to the appropriate culture. However, translators are not SEO specialists, so they wouldn’t know how to do on-page optimization. On the other hand, a translator and an SEO specialist could work together at optimizing your translated pages, as the SEO guy would know what needs to be done and the translator can actually do it. Still, such solutions are rarely available from most of the translation agencies and when they are, you will have to pay by the hour or get negotiate a total cost for your entire website.
Since translators aren’t SEO specialists and the SEO guys don’t know the language, they need to work together at putting up a list of keywords as well, which is the basic action to take when starting with optimization for search engines. Even if your website is already optimized in its original language, the keywords can’t simply be translated as that won’t be what people would really look after. You need a native of that language who lived in the area to solve this problem, and he is the one who could pinpoint some great keywords for you.
Another option is to hire some local SEO specialists to optimize your website, but that may lead to other issues and could cost a lot more, depending on the language and the target market.
The second part of SEO is tougher though. If you have great content on your website and it is interesting enough for people to link to it as a reference, you’ll see incoming links popping up in time. If not, you’ll have to work on the links on your own.
Despite the above, getting professional language services to translate your website is a great strategy in targeting specific markets even if SEO isn’t done by a specialist. Always ask your translation agency if they can do basic SEO optimization for your website and they will come up with a solution for you.
