2020 is ushering in “the new normal” where more people than ever before are living, working and even shopping online. 2020 is also going to be remembered as the year that English began its decline as the primary language of the internet, with less than half of the content on the internet being written in English for the first time ever. Certified translations can serve to increase your ability to successfully market to a more international audience online.
As we enter the digital age and the technological revolution more fully, it will become increasingly important to have a multilingual presence online. Your translation need can best be determined by figuring out where the international markets are, which ones are least competitive and where the money is. The website translation is important if you want to directly bypass the vast majority of your competition, enhance your influence and increase your market share and profitability with your online marketing campaign.
According to research that was conducted by NIMDZI and posted on the PRNewsWire, “The study, which included 9,209 consumers worldwide, was conducted in 66 languages in 74 countries and suggests that online shoppers are strongly connected to their native language when making decisions online. As e-commerce grows, the findings are even more pertinent today.”
What that means is that 90% of all online shoppers are more than willing to buy from foreign vendors, but they want to be able to see product reviews, videos, content and information in their own languages, and be able to purchase the products in their own currency. If you do not provide them with their information in their language, they take their money to someone else.
The first thing you accomplish by using professional translators to translate all of your marketing materials is to ensure that your audience can find you and will be willing to buy from you. Website translation services can additionally serve to put you out in front of a much larger audience. Best of all? The complete website translation will help to greatly diminish the amount of competition you have, especially when you move outside of English-only phase for your website and marketing content.
One very common solution for website translation services, seems to be the use of translation plugins or other translation apps that may provide little more than translation errors. Professional translation services are much better suited for this job. Professional human translators can provide you with a quality translation, on budget and on time.
Perhaps most important of all, a professional translation agency will usually provide work that is guaranteed to include an accurate and complete translation service. There are many reasons that a complete and accurate website translation is necessary and which will be considered later on in this article. For now, the focus remains on the website translation and its relevance to visibility and SEO.
The area of primary concern regarding any marketing translation, is the visibility factor. Here you will discover how to circumvent not only most of your competition, but literally more than 50% of all the content on the internet.
All you need to begin is a translation company, preferably a translation agency that also specializes in localization services. You then need to build different variations of your site either in sub-directories or using sub-domains for the foreign language translations of your marketing materials and your website. Why?
Remember, 90% of all buyers online are ready to purchase from you, but they want the information in their own language. It is also going to be pretty important to get them to your website in the first place. This means that you have to actively market your products in their language, but the website translation actually provides you with the solution you need there.
Even the best website translation apps and plugins generally do not provide fixed pages on the website in foreign languages. You need to have every page of the website professionally translated in order for it to be indexed on the foreign language search engine results page.
According to a report published in June of 2020 on the EURACTIV, “Analyzing the open web environment, the percentage of English language websites is 59.5%, according to W3Techs, a marketing company specialized in the research of the Internet population by language. In the same list, Russian appears in second position and Spanish in third, with 8.6% and 4%, respectively. The first 14 languages represented in the list of W3Techs accounted for almost 94% of Internet web pages.”
Once you use language translation services to move away from English only content, you have just bypassed at the very least, somewhere between 50% and 60% of all of the content on the internet. It seems that as long as you provide quality content, and you have used competent, document translation services to translate and post that content, your chances of ranking high up on the search engines have increased dramatically.
If you move away from the top 12 or 14 languages on the internet using localized translation services, you will no longer have to compete with 94% to 98% of all of the content on the internet. And yes, you still have the potential to reach tens of millions of potential new website visitors.
Even if you just have 10,000,000 potential clients but your competition is less than 1% of all of the content on the internet thanks to the content translation, that should be enough to get you on the board when it comes to sales and marketing online.
Human-powered translations can be used to translate to any language outside of the top 12 languages online. Since all of these languages each comprise less than 1% of the content on the internet, you will have used that translation to get rid of more than 99% of all your competition, both direct and indirect.
How much easier does it need to be for you to get into the top ranks on the first page of the foreign language search engine results page.
How challenging would it be to reach the number one spot on the search engine results page if 99% of the content on the internet was no longer in competition? Even so, it is never wise to put all of your eggs in one basket, but fear not, your website translation also gives you all of the tools you need for a multilingual social media marketing campaign.
There is an interesting post on the HootSuite that provides links to many social media platforms that are primarily hosted in languages other than English. Among the social media data and statistics linked on that site however, we also see that English may remain the primary language on many social media platforms, it is far from the only language in use.
There are more than 100 languages in common use on Facebook, more than thirty languages in common use on Twitter and it is challenging to determine exactly how many languages are commonly used on YouTube, but given that it is the second most popular website on the internet, probably more than are used on most social media platforms.
That should give you more than enough room to pick from any of the less popular languages on the internet, find a professional translation company that provides you with an option for localization services and to use those translation services to instantly rid yourself of more than 99% of all competition.
Not just competition in your personal niche, but you can use a single website translation to get around literally more than 99% of all competition, direct and indirect. You should also remember that this same single quality translation will still provide you with more than ten million potential new viewers and visitors at the same time.
Marketing is all about working smarter and not harder. Do the research, find the hungry markets, and go after them, especially if they do not have exceptional levels of competition. It is still work and nobody is going to tell you how easy it is.
You need to do your research, find your markets, ensure your products are going to provide the solutions the audience needs, and then do your website translation and begin marketing. Professional translation services should be used in order to prevent any translation errors that may put off the new audience.
When you can find that market which has virtually no competition, the end results should be more than worth it. The website translation needs to be precise, as does the multilingual marketing campaign. However, the website translation, if properly done, has also given you all of the necessary tools to begin actively multiplying your content in all of the translated languages that you have selected.
Bigger markets, hungrier markets, much less competition and all provided by the use of translation services and a little bit of personal effort. And there you have all the makings for a successful international, multilingual marketing campaign.
Ofer Tirosh is the CEO of Tomedes, a translation company with a focus on globalization through translation and localization.
