Building Websites, Traffic, and Income
Going Global – A Small Business Guide
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Christian Arno, founder and Managing Director of UK translation/localisation company Lingo24, tells how multilingual online marketing and cost-effective business growth goes hand-in-hand
How does a business broaden its online presence in foreign lands? Well, you’ll need a foreign language website in the target market for starters.
You must identify the best market to target through research, and see where there is a gap for you to exploit. If there are other similar businesses operating in a specific country, that’s a good sign as it demonstrates a demand for your service.
The next stage is to buy a locally hosted domain name in the target country, for example ‘.fr’ in France. This lays the foundation for you to translate your website into the desired language. However, from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective, you shouldn’t translate the keywords. And here’s why.
The correct dictionary translation of a keyword or phrase may NOT be what people use to search for the service locally; they may use colloquialisms or a different word that means the same thing. So in the same way as you identify your industry’s highest ranking keywords for the Danish market, such as via Google’s free keyword finder, you must research the keywords for each country, to ensure your foreign language website is properly optimized.
These keywords should then be incorporated these into a professionally translated website. It’s important that native speakers are used to translate your website as it must exude professionalism in all your target markets.
To help the SEO process along, you can also use pay-per-click (PPC) and Google AdWords, which allows you to test out online marketing techniques for very little money – you can set your monthly budget at a nominal amount and gauge its efficacy without blowing your entire marketing budget. Indeed, two of the biggest mistakes many entrepreneurs make are trying to peddle their products to the wrong market – and spending a lot of money doing so. So this is a very cost-effective means of marketing both domestically and internationally.
And there you have it. With nothing more than a networked computer and some entrepreneurial savvy you can go global without breaking the bank.
About lingo24
Global translation company Lingo24 has websites in all the major European languages, including Danish, Swedish, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, German and Norwegian. Subsequently, their international sales have grown by 20% in the past three years. They recently won best Export and Business-to-Business company at the Herald Scotland Digital Business Awards.
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20 Responses to Going Global – A Small Business Guide
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Thanks, Is there a possibility to get an overview about SEO Companies which provide local translater for exemple for the spanish language?
interesting subject but if i need one tool for translation in engles ?
Didn’t know about Lingo24, thanks for posting that.
I translate by hand, sort of, I use Google’s translater
I’m of the opinion that if you WANT something FROM Google, use as many Google tools as you can find, they pay 20,000 employees and talented engineers to create free tools for us it use… to NOT use Google’s freely provided tools (and then ask Google to rank you high) is a bit like attending a Ford Motor convention driving a Chevy)
I never thought to seek out “other than english speaking” SEO clients… I’m leaving money on the table by doing so aren’t I?
What I have done is use the Google translator tool to get social bookmarking links from overseas SB sites. The only reason I tested it is because addthis.com keeps adding new overseas SB sites and I tested Yigg.com (a german Digg clone). Results?
one posting boosted one of my local SEO client’s sites a dozen positions in Google. It seems by doing so gave Google the illusion of my client being so overwhelmingly popular “they” were “talking about it” in Germany.
No other competing website bothered to get an overseas link making my client seem, to googlebot, to be a veritable monster.
request permission to reblog this post (of course I’d link back here like I did on the other great articles you wrote that I used)
Yeah, is there anyway to get in multi-language? i mean translations?
The purpose of services like Lingo24 is to provide more accurate translations and they do multi-language translations.
I think the difference between using Google Translator and an actual translator becomes clearer as the content grows in size. You could probably fake a Google translated tweet but a sales page would not work. We don’t want our sites to turn into the internet equivalent of Chinese fireworks.
Thanks guys and “Have Happy Good Time At My Location”
This is easy for someone who owns a translation company, but to actually grasp what words the locals use is a pretty big time investment.
Good recommendation
I started blogging about two years ago, my first two blogs was one Danish and English, at that point of time there was not much info to find on multilingual blogging or WebPages, so I follow the well know trial and error path.
After I got a bit into it, I started blogs on Swedish, German, French, Italian and Croatian, for the translation I use native speaking people as you recommend, and I can only confirm that this is best way to do it.
I also have my native speakers help me researching the keywords, and have meanwhile managed to explain not just to translate the title but actually to find a title which is most suitable on the specific language.
Kindest regards
Morten
Pretty cool…Starters will be gracious to read this..This is one that includes all the tips…Especially covered the topic on translation on which most have the problem…Enjoyed the post…
If you want to start promoting you website locally make sure to use a local ad agency or a person who is a native speaker. This will be of great help finding the perfect keywords in that local language.
Have seen so many companies making the mistake to use an english speaking SEO company for their local websites and PPC campaigns.
I recently started focusing on local websites in stead of global ones, reason for this is that on local level there sometimes is much less competition although the target market might be smaller.
can u tell how to search for keyword in googles free keyword tools for different languages and countries.
Great post, now in my country is hard for get a good jobs…
interesting article, quite difficult to make it happen, but one must now try …
Hy I am write also blog in English and I put translator service into my blog and I often us them to translate some blog in other language
Google now also has a service where it can translate your PPC ads into a local language, can be helpfull but be carefull as sometimes the translations are wrong
great article.. i got lot of information about SEO companies. read more about SEO companines at :http://www.organicseosemppc.com/seo-training.html
It’s actually a very good point! because when promoting a your website locally, you’ll be able to target and win permanent local clients.And I believe that this is the type of clients you musn’t forget.
Besides, you should pay attention to the translation, and to my mind, this task must be done by professional translater, not using google gadgets.
Eventually, I must say that this is a good article since it brings critical issues to light.
Best regards
Interesting article…Got so many information about the SEO company…Sharing this is a good job..
You definitely need a native speaker to effectively reach your target audience. There are a lot of translation companies out there and prices vary widely. Do your homework. I find that a company that focuses on a single language pair is more detail oriented.