What if there was a guaranteed way for you to expand your business without blowing your entire company budget in one hit?
No, it’s not too good to be true. There is an answer and it’s creating a multilingual business website.
Hundreds and thousands of businesses have gained from translating their website. But why exactly should you do it? WPML has seven reasons why your next investment should be a multilingual one.
1. Translating your website is more cost-effective than other options
Getting a multilingual business website is one of the cheapest and most reliable options for expanding your business.
While a worldwide marketing strategy might sound like an attractive idea, they are incredibly expensive and have no guarantees of succeeding. Meanwhile, translating your business website is a tactic employed by hundreds of thousands of businesses to good effect.
It has previously been difficult to quantify exactly how much it costs to build a multilingual website but now it’s possible. With the help of expert developers for multilingual sites you can get a multilingual site that looks exactly like you want, loads quickly, is secure and never crashes.
2. It increases your sales
Ultimately, increasing sales is the driving force behind any decision made by a company. Translating your website is one of the most effective ways of achieving it.
Creating a multilingual business website has directly increased sales for a number of companies. For example, Under.me says that it doubled its conversion rate in Germany after translating its website into German. Meanwhile, the French version of its website boosted its conversion rate in France from 0.67% to 1%.
Indeed, it’s a benefit that the majority of businesses experience. Sri Sharma from Net Media Planet says on average businesses witness a 20% increase in conversions when they translate landing pages and ads. Additionally, websites which completely localized their content see a 70% rise.
Clearly, one of the reasons why customers are more inclined to make a purchase is because they are viewing websites in their own language. Which leads us to our next point.
3. The majority of users are not native English speakers
Speaking purely in numbers, the majority of internet users around the world would prefer not to browse websites in English. Therefore, it does not make sense to expect them to want to shop in it either.
As of December 2017, only 25.3% of internet users were English native. In contrast, 2.7 billion people are from non-English speaking countries. That’s a lot of people who will want to browse your website in other languages.
Furthermore, if you think that the majority of people speak English anyway you might be disappointed. To illustrate, only 39% of people in France speak English while the figure is lower in other countries. In Italy, it’s 35% and Spain less than 23%. And these are in European countries which you would expect to be higher. In China, for instance, only 0.75% are fluent in English. Therefore, a multilingual business website is crucial if you want to find clients from abroad.
4. Expand into new markets
A translated business website will introduce your company to new customers from markets you did not even know you could access.
As any good salesman will tell you, your pitch needs to be different for each person based on how they want to communicate and what they want to hear. Therefore, translating your website is an excellent starting point. If you have an English website and want to move into the South American market, a multilingual business website in Spanish and Portuguese is an important starting point.
In addition to the content on your website, different markets will have different values which need to be reflected in your marketing. For example, you will see vast differences in advertising strategies between western and Asian markets. For this reason, localizing your marketing based on the country/region will see you welcoming new customers from around the world.
Translating your web content and marketing is great for customers which you are directly targeting. But what about those who might find your website organically?
5. Improve your multilingual SEO
SEO is one of the most important strategies for finding new customers so it only makes sense that enhancing it for different languages will do the same in new markets.
Creating multilingual SEO will help search engines such as Google understand which languages your pages are in and which ones should be targeted at certain people. In addition, behavioral factors such as the amount of time people spend on your website are taken into account. Therefore, if you are trying to promote your website in the wrong language your rankings might take a hit thanks to a high bounce rate.
A great way to keep your multilingual SEO in the best shape is by using Yoast SEO which is completely compatible with WPML. Improved SEO, of course, provides another significant advantage for your business.
6. Increase traffic to your website
A multilingual business website with great SEO will see more users from around the world visit your website.
A translated website will increase your traffic within weeks. To illustrate, Neil Patel increased search traffic by 47% in three weeks when he translated his content into 82 languages. Moreover, he noted that impressions for search queries were increased giving prospects for stronger growth.
More people on your website, of course, leads to more potential sales but also another indirect advantage to translating your website.
7. Build trust and brand recognition
A translated website means more people on your website which, therefore, means a greater awareness of your brand.
A multilingual business website will attract people from around the world who will start to associate you with a certain product or service. Doing so will differentiate you from the competition. Customers love familiarity and knowing your company will help create repeat customers.
Furthermore, a website in multiple languages adds credibility to your brand. There is a general acceptance that a company with multiple languages must be “global.” Similarly, if your website is completely localized then clients will appreciate your understanding of their culture, earning their trust.
The steps to creating a multilingual business website
Now that you are aware of the benefits, the next step is to get translating.
If you are not sure what to do then check out our 7 step guide to starting a business website.