Why You're Losing Traffic & Money By Not Translating Your Content
Whether you're a small business or a Fortune 500 company, any marketer or SEO specialist will tell you that creating value-driven content is one of the best ways to increase traffic, engagement, and reach. A great marketer will take it a step further from creating value-driven content to translating and/or transcribing it. It's 2020, the world is online, searching, buying, and sharing. A successful brand understands this and adapts its content to its audience. As the amount of people online grows, where, when, and how they consume content is also evolving.
There are people all over this country and around the world who could find value in the content you put out but that traffic could most likely result in bounces or never get to you simply because they can't understand the information. If your website is in English, you will get your message across to about 27% of the total market. 73% of the global market prefers websites with content in their native language. If people don’t understand the content of your website, you cannot hope to make a sale or even a lead to nurture. Think about how many people are dropping out of your customer journey funnel because of language.
The translation or transcribing process can look different from business to business, budget to budget. You can translate your website into multiple languages, transcribe video content so that subtitles can be available in different languages or even have written content and video actually created in different languages by people who understand the culture, grammar, and nuances in language that can get lost in a word for word translation. Such inaccuracies can significantly change the context of the message.
The way search is conducted has evolved. In the past decade, voice search has drastically exploded. 20% of all Google mobile searches are voice queries. 41% of adults and 55% of teens use voice search daily, according to Google. 65% of people who own a Google Home or Amazon Echo “can’t imagine going back.” It’s no surprise that 50% of all searches across the internet will be voice-based this year. Translating content to train voice search machines comes with its own unique challenges and interesting points. A keyword or phrase that ranks highly and has little competition in one country doesn’t necessarily have the same standing in another country. Simply translating information is not enough if is to be optimized for search engines in the target language. According to Tomedes.com, "Voice search is still in the ‘early adopters’ phase of technological development, but its rapidly, but its rapidly move towards ‘early majority.’ This means that translators who can learn what they need to know now about voice SEO have a growing marketplace opening up before them."
People assume that content translation only makes sense if you want to be a global brand but let's take the United States, for instance, even better, let's just focus on New York. Creating content in Spanish, French, and Chinese could instantly multiply any company based in New York's reach. Both local and international brands can benefit from giving visitors the option of a localized experience.
If your brand's goal is to go global, then content translation is undeniably a MUST. Before you launch an international campaign, you'll need to make sure you have the appropriate translations for your site, app, marketing materials, or product documentation. Don't get me wrong, English is spoken all over the world but as a prospective client, having information available to me in my native language results in a much better customer experience. Having localized content allows your customers to easily understand your message in a language they know and can easily understand. It can become the difference between spectacular success and costly failure.
There's so much information in English- but China and India have higher numbers of internet users. There are so many other countries with high internet users that you may not be optimizing your content for. How many brands are missing out on millions of customers because their content wasn't optimized for these audiences?
Content Translation Tools:
Google's free service instantly translates words, phrases, and web pages between English and over 100 other languages. It offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, and an application programming interface that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications.
Find and hire the best freelance translators to take your message abroad.
Find & hire freelance translators on Upwork for professional translation services. Post your project for free and manage your freelancers online.
Bablic is the simplest, most cost-effective translation management tool for businesses of all sizes. Maximize SEO while controlling all your localized content—with no coding and no headaches. Bablic is a hands-off complete website localization solution. No more building a new website, making extensive changes to your back-end, changing your website’s structure to accommodate a new language, dealing with translators, agencies, and so on. That is all in the past, and the future of website translation is Bablic. Make your website multilingual in 3 easy steps. Submit your URL, make the necessary changes in terms of content, images, and layout, and simply publish your new language by copy/pasting our code onto your website. That’s all.
Smartling enables brands to maximize the output of time, energy, and cost spent on translation and localization to deliver culturally relevant brand experiences that facilitate global growth. Smartling is a manual translation service that mimics the features of a machine translator. It is fully automated, yet it uses a team of human translators to do the actual job. Its API automatically captures your site content, fields it out to professional translators or to your in-house translators, and then uploads it back to your site while you relax. You can be sure that your translations will be contextually accurate and executed in a timely manner.