If your goal is to increase the online sale of your products and services in the foreign market, the first thing you have to do is to obtain good search engine positioning, as well as, of course, following a SEO strategy aimed at your target audience.
In short, website translation or localization is essential, but it does not guarantee that your company occupies the best search engine positioning in your chosen market. For this reason search engine or SEO optimization together with good localization will make your content concrete, precise and aimed at potential clients. It will also result in a website that is optimized, meaning that it will be in one of the highest search engine results. In order to achieve this, we carry out a series of specific steps:
- Become familiar with the target market
- It is necessary to study and analyze the market that you want to enter, getting to know the public and how this public perceives and is attracted to the products. It will thus become much easier to adapt the web content to these users: finding keywords, using colors and images that are typical for that market etc.
- Selecting the keywords
The choice of keywords varies depending on each country. It is therefore necessary to choose the ones used by users when they are carrying a search. This step is really important to attract the targeted users. We must therefore be very careful and ensure that they appear exactly where they are needed on our website.
- URL and domain
At this point, you must choose an appropriate strategy to avoid damaging your web positioning. It must be one that allows you to optimally index your website in several countries.
- Adaptation of the source code
As we have already mentioned, website localization is fundamental, but it isn’t everything. The website’s source code must be optimized and adapted to achieve good indexing.
- Content localization
The content and information that you offer to your clients must be relevant and practical, in order to reinforce web presence and to increase the trust in your products and services. To do this, we need to take the target market’s linguistic, cultural, religious or social characteristics into account.
- Local links
It is essential to achieve enough quality local links. They will help your website to be more appreciated by the search engines, resulting in a great increase in your search engine positioning. Therefore, if we obtain a high number of backlinks, in Italy, our position in Italian search engines will improve.
- Social media presence
Social networks are one of the most used communication channels for the sale and purchase of products and services. It is really important to be present in these media. However, social networks vary depending on the country. We need to pay attention to each audience, adapting the content to suit each one.
- Being thorough and detail oriented
Localization, which is adapted and aimed at a specific audience can ensure either the success or failure of your campaign. You must pay close attention to each of the details during the localization process. This includes using the correct time and date format, being careful with the colors used so as not to hurt the sensitivities of the target audience and paying attention to phone numbers and prefixes.
- There is no end to this.
Localization does not have a start and end date. It must be worked on continuously. We must move to advance, innovate and evolve to offer fresh information to users.