When appealing to international consumers, businesses need to talk the talk

by Stratton Craig

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Imagine that you’re looking to buy a product online – maybe a particular pair of shoes or a watch that you’ve had your eye on. You type the name of the product into the search box, and plenty of results appear. However, when you click on a link to an online shop, the page is in another language that you can’t read. All of the details are listed on the page, with a full description and terms and conditions of sale, but you don’t understand any of it. The second and third websites that you look at present exactly the same problem. Would you still buy the item?
Thanks to the reach and speed of the internet, companies now buy and sell in a global marketplace, but there is no current universal language on the web. Many potential buyers don’t feel comfortable making purchases from a solely English language site if their native language is different. With no one vocabulary to unite consumers, multi-national companies and British businesses alike may struggle to engage their audiences. Having SEO copy and keywords on your English-language website in multiple languages is a great way of attracting international business and expanding your customer base.
To market a product or service to end users in other countries, it’s not enough to just understand their language – as with SEO in English, you need to know what it is they’re actually searching for. Key phrases may not translate well, or there may be alternative spellings and slang terms that are more popular in other languages. Take Japanese, for example. Words are borrowed from other languages and adapted, and phrases in slang combine English characters with Japanese kanji to create terms that even other native speakers may struggle to identify. Failing to take this type of cultural difference into account could lose you thousands of potential customers every month, which is why researching the most effective SEO keywords in your target language is so important.
Our translation services are more than just ‘from one language to another’. We understand the nuances of different dialects and the cultural factors that affect search terms, and we can tailor translated copy to include relevant SEO phrases and the most appropriate search keywords. If you’d like to know more please don’t hesitate to get in touch.