3-Steps to a successful multilingual website
We’re combining our 3 lead web services to help your website launch in international markets with a bang.
All good things come in threes – that’s certainly true when it comes to launching your website in a new language and country. Follow these 3 key steps to start seeing results from your website:
Meet our Multilingual SEM Project Manager: Ronak Thakkar
Here’s another instalment of our Meet the Team series..and what better day to introduce you all to Ronak than on his birthday! Many Happy Returns…
Ronak joined Web-Translations in June 2010, after completing an MBA at Cardiff University. Originally from Ahmedabad in the Gujarat region of India, he spent several years working as a software engineer before specialising in online marketing.
Ronak is part of the production team, and is responsible for the final stage of our website localisation projects. When we translate a website, it’s important that we optimise and promote it so that our clients gain traffic from non-English markets. This involves a range of tactics, including search engine optimisation, paid advertising, and link building. Ronak’s keen ability for learning is really important, as Search Engine Marketing is a field that is constantly changing.
Impressively, Ronak also recently gained his Google Adwords Professional accreditation, the results of months of hard work.
When not hard at work making websites perform for our clients, Ronak enjoys bowling, watching films and eating out.
Web-Translations offers Google AdWords Certified Professional Services
We are pleased to announce tha
t our Search Engine Marketing Manager, Ronak Thakkar, has been awarded Google Adwords Certified Professional status.
Adwords certification is a globally recognized stamp of approval which showcases knowledge of the latest AdWords tools, best practice techniques, and demonstrates the ability to effectively manage pay-per-click campaigns. (more…)
How to localise a content-managed site – Case Study
We’re going to take you step-by-step through a localisation project to explain how it’s done. The example we’ve chosen is the multilingual site we did for Loc8tor.
Loc8tor.com is an ecommerce site where customers can buy Loc8tor devices to help them keep track of keys, mobile phones, pets and all sorts of other belongings. This is an ideal showcase for the different elements involved in the professional localisation of a website.
With any website, the first step is to get the content into a format that translators can easily work with.
There are two main ways of translating content from a CMS – the translators can work directly into the system and input translations as they go along, or an export can be obtained from the system – usually either XML or Excel format.
Translation is not always done in a linear fashion – starting at the beginning and finishing at the end – a translator needs to be able to skip parts and come back to them later, raise queries if something is unclear etc. When it comes to proofreading the translation, a file will usually be easier to work on and edit than the content within the CMS. With this in mind, an exported file is often the best method.
So, the Project Manager will deliver the file to the translators, or give them access to the CMS as necessary. Once the translation is complete, the proofreaders do their part. Any images or other parts of the website not already part of the CMS/export file would be localised at this stage too – a professional localisation includes everything, not just the obvious text components of the website.
If an export file has been used, then this needs to be imported back into the CMS. This is usually done by the client’s web team, but sometimes we are given an access login to the system and can upload it ourselves.
The published sites we localised for Loc8tor can be found at www.loc8tor.eu, www.loc8tor.fr and www.loc8tor.es.
With some projects, this is where our involvement ends, but there are other stages that are recommended in order for the localised website to be a success:
Usability testing – this is especially important for eCommerce websites or any others where transactions take place. The localised site is tested from the user’s point of view to make sure all functions work correctly, links lead to the pages they should, etc.
Multilingual SEO & eMarketing – just because you’ve invested in localising your site doesn’t mean that customers in that particular country know it is there! Submitting your site to local search engines, building some inbound links and promoting the new website online will all help get more traffic, and these initial measures are included as standard in our Strategic Approach to Localisation packages.
Managing updates – it’s important that you consider how updates to the website will be managed. Many CMSs can be configured to send updates for translation, which minimises the delay in keeping the multilingual site current.
Keyword Research – Knowing the most popular search terms for your product or service is critical. We help to capture maximum exposure by identifying not just your keywords, but also complementary keywords and competitive keywords to help you optimise your website, and maximize the effectiveness of your multilingual Pay Per Click campaigns.
Pay-Per-Click – ideal for giving your web traffic a boost, for promotions, sales and to announce new content. In most industries it will be expensive to stay at the top of results using PPC alone, but it should form part of your overall web strategy if you have sufficient budget.
A good localisation strategy will consider these additional elements of the process as well as simply translating the main body of text on a website.
If you have any questions about website localisation, or any comments about this article, please let us know.
How to pay < £0.03 per click on competitive keywords
I’ve been helping a client manage their PPC spend recently by training one of their team members. I don’t normally do this; it was just a favour to one of our best clients which happens to be a local company.
It took me back; I remembered the very early days when you’d pay 0.05$ per keyword word and could expect to be in the top 5 results. For most industries, those days are long gone. (more…)