Ian SpencerWhen it comes to getting more sales and enquiries from countries outside of your operating base, the challenge to not only attract but also convert this business is often significant, as understanding more than one language and culture can often be something that takes a while to learn and then perfect.
When it comes to International SEO and targeting countries that do not understand English as a first language, many websites often fail because they think that putting Google Translate or some other kind of technology on their site is going to be enough to not only get them search engine traffic, but also sales. However, this could not be further from the truth, as unless you are willing to invest in professional website translation, either in-house or outsourced, then you are going to struggle, and probably not even make any headway into your new markets.
From A Users Point Of View
Respect, trust and understanding, three of the main reasons why if you fail to get your content translated professionally and accurately, you will be lucky to gain any new business at all.
If you have not taken the time or made the investment to translate your content correctly from a user’s, customers and site visitors point of view, then this just screams disrespect for the country you are trying to get business from. It looks lazy and if you then ask yourself how many times you have walked away from a website that was badly thought out and had poor text, you can see what I mean. Just because you are selling to another country does not mean you lower your levels of content quality, in fact, some would say you need to enhance it, but either way, you simply need to show a level of respect by investing in content.
Trust and understanding are also crucial, because as we mentioned above, people quickly walk away from websites that they do not trust or understand, therefore your content needs to convert and lure the visitor into becoming a customer. You only have a few seconds to make a user stay on your website, and you will do this by making sure that they quickly understand what you do and what you can do for them, and this relies on decent content. It is so important that the visitor trusts you as a company, and they will simply not do this if your content is badly translated and it looks like no thought or effort has gone into it.
From An SEO Point Of View
If you are looking to get your website ranking outside of your own country, then SEO is incredibly important in terms of onsite optimisation and an offsite SEO campaign, as often just getting decent rankings in your own country is hard enough, so you can imagine the challenges that lay ahead with other countries.
If you are trying to get your website ranking in other countries, then just sticking Google Translate onto your site and hoping for the best is just not going to cut it, as content is king and without your content being professionally translated into the correct language(s), your site is simply not going to rank. It is really important to remember that search engines, and more so the algorithms that run them, are far more sophisticated and advanced than most people realise, which means that if you fail to put the correct level of investment and effort into making sure your content is native and correctly translated, you will get little to no returns and rewards for your effort.
Your SEO campaign, no matter which country you are targeting relies on excellent content, content that is quality, engaging and relevant, and if you fail to tick these three boxes then your whole campaign is potentially just going to fall flat on its face. SEO is basically a competition, where you are competing for rankings against other businesses in the same industry, so if your competition is maybe local and has a website that has perfect content, you are always going to struggle to beat them, which is why professionally translated content is so important to your International SEO campaign.
So What Do You Do?
In my opinion, although you can tick all of the international and overseas ranking boxes that big sites like Moz discuss, using a professional website translation company, is so, so important. I personally use a company called Brightlines Translation Services for my clients, but there are many online experts and firms and also translation comparison websites that can really help your whole campaign, as if you are not going to invest in professional translation then I promise you now that your campaign is just not going to be effective as it should be. Automatic tools are, at best, sloppy and at worst a million miles away from any kind of accuracy, and you have to bear in mind that you are trying to win business and rankings, so if your content is poor, then so is your SEO campaign.
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