If you’re doing business online, the chances are you’re speaking to more than just one audience.
A quick look at your Google Analytics and you might be surprised to see a number of non-English speaking visitors to your site.
But, a look at the study ‘Can’t Read, Won’t Buy’ and your prospects of making a sale in new markets without website translation is unlikely – with 55% of people preferring to purchase in their own language.
Creating a personalized experience and value for your potential customers requires more than just an English website.
In short, everyone can benefit from making their website multilingual, but there are a few standout businesses where it makes even more sense. Are you in one of them? We’ll take a look at the industries where translating your website should be a top priority for boosting sales and standing out from the competition.
6 Businesses that Need to Translate
Businesses That Operate in Countries with More Than One Language
You might not be ready for global domination just yet, but that doesn’t mean your website shouldn’t be translated into more than language if the country you do business in has more than one official language.
And, there are several countries where this is the case. People living in Switzerland (French, Italian, German), Belgium (Dutch, German, French), Canada (English, French), to name just a few, face this exact situation.
Then there are the markets where you might not even realize there’s a very strong second language dominating the population. Take the USA for example, where around 13% of the population speaks Spanish as a first language – that’s around 41 million US citizens you won’t be targeting your services toward.
Tourism and Travel Industry
The tourism industry is naturally an area where translating your website will have a big impact on the types of tourists you’ll be able to attract.
It’s important that tourists can find information online that they can actually understand when booking an experience or hotel in another country. This is particularly the case for:
- Hotels, hostels, and other accommodation
- Transportation providers (buses, trains, planes)
- Landmarks, sightseeing, culture
- Tour and event organizers
Just take a look at the most powerful outbound tourism market – China. Chinese residents took 149.7m overseas trips in 2018, and when you consider that only 10% of the Chinese population speak English, it’s a huge market that those within the tourism industry might miss out on if they don’t consider localizing their website.
(source The Telegraph)
Five out of the nine countries listed as spending the most money on international tourism are non-English-speaking. That’s a huge market.
International eCommerce Businesses
Expand the markets you sell in and grow your online business: it’s that simple.
The international eCommerce market is expanding at an exorbitant rate and is projected to be worth a staggering €881 billion ($994 billion USD) by 2020.
But, as we mentioned earlier, a huge proportion of online shoppers won’t even consider purchasing a product if they can’t read about it in their own language. If a customer can’t understand the details on a product page, they’re unlikely to click “Add to Cart” (especially if they can’t read “Add to Cart”).
Translating your eCommerce website is one of the easiest ways to increase your conversion rate (of course, you’ll need to ensure you’ve actually got an infrastructure in place to actually sell internationally first).
And, Dutch eCommerce retailer La Machine Cycle Club is proof of just that. By adding two additional languages to their site, they were able to increase their conversion rate by 25% and saw a 50% increase in international website traffic.
By translating the whole shopper experience for your potential customer, you build that all-important trust element with your new markets and give your website users a buying experience they can actually understand. And, if you’re using website translation solution Weglot, you can be sure that the whole checkout process is automatically translated, including any customer emails following their online purchase.
When trying to go international with your business, it’s also important to use a WordPress managed hosting provider that will help support growth, doesn’t slow down your site speed, and ensures your customers have a seamless purchasing experience.
Pressable does just that and more. Their expert server architecture ensures that your site is delivered around the world with incredible speed. And alongside expert hosting abilities, Pressable offers the Jetpack Security Daily subscription when you host with them. It is an extra add-on that takes your site to the next level with expanded security, malware scanning and backup options.
Companies Offering Digital Products
Businesses that offer physical products have a number of logistical obstacles to work through if they want to start selling internationally. But, for those offering digital products and services—shipping costs and delivery issues are not a problem.
Which is why if you do offer such digital services, website translation can open up your business to the world, making branching out to other countries effortless.
This is especially true for growing industries like online education, an industry that many businesses and entrepreneurs are starting to tap into.
Asian countries, in particular, are fast becoming a big market using e-learning platforms, in addition to Romania, Poland, Brazil and Colombia close behind. And, what do they all have in common? They’re not English-speaking countries.
(source Docebo e-learning trends report 2014-2016)
There’s a huge amount of potential growth to be made by companies that just need to localize the offering on their website.
Businesses Looking to Increase Their SEO
SEO and keyword rankings should be front of mind for eCommerce sites.
92 percent of all online experiences begin with a search query – which just goes to show how important that keyword research really is.
Further to that, and perhaps quite frightening to businesses with no SEO strategy in place, the first position on Google gets somewhere between 30-45% of the clicks, which falls to 12-15% for the third place and less than 2% in the last two positions.
Essentially, if your site doesn’t show up on search results, there’s little chance users will click on your website.
But, what does this have to do with website translation? When people search online they are usually doing so in their own language. If you site isn’t available in their language, then they simply won’t be able to find you.
We can see the benefit of website translation through well-known marketing blogger Niel Patel, who increased his search traffic by 47% after translating his blog into 82 languages.
Luckily, if you choose website translation solution Weglot, your multilingual SEO is already taken care of. Your translated pages are automatically indexed on Google, you’ll have fully translated metadata, translated URLs and hreflang tags added to help Google understand both the language of the page and which region it’s intended for.
Those looking for some help with the SEO performance of their website will be pleased to know if you use WordPress hosting provider Pressable, you’ll also get access to the Jetpack Security Daily subscription, which offers WordPress users all the SEO tools needed to enhance their searchability.
And, good news. Weglot is fully compatible with all WordPress plugins.
Translating Your Website the Easy Way
Adding additional languages to your website means opening up your revenue streams. In a growing international environment, speaking to your markets in their own language is a guaranteed way to enhance the experience of your website user.
While translating makes sense for many businesses, it’s especially suitable for those we’ve mentioned in detail above.
Naturally, the next question you’ll have is how to actually translate your website.
And, having chosen WordPress as your CMS of choice, you’re already aware of the flexibility, customization, and countless plugins that can make your site stand out.
When it comes to translating your website, the Weglot translation plugin is the highest-rated translation app on the WordPress Directory, so you know you’re in safe hands. When you install Weglot on your website, you’ll have a multilingual website up and running in just minutes—without the need for developers or knowledge of code.
With more than 100 languages available, Weglot automatically translates and displays the content of your site. It’s quick to install, and you’ll get a fully customizable language switcher added to your site, allowing visitors to instantly see your website in their local language. Through the Weglot dashboard you can manually edit your translations or order professional translations to fine-tune any language nuances or colloquialisms.
Compatible with all themes and plugins, Weglot has zero compatibility issues and no impact on your site speed.
To get started, check out Weglot for yourself through the 10 day free trial.
WeGlot
Weglot is completely user-friendly translation plugin that connects the world to your website. It installs in a matter of minutes. As soon as you integrate the API, we provide a first layer of automatic translation. We know that machine translation is not perfect, so we also allow users to correct those translations so that they make perfect sense.
