Best Practices of Website Localization

The article explains certain best practices to make your website localization a success.

Expanding any business abroad is a major undertaking and often it happens that most businesses take a long time to touch a matured state in their approach to website localization. Often localization of a website is confused with translation. Website localization goes beyond translation and is a more specialized process of adapting web content and applications for regional (local) consumption. The process modifies the source language and other site elements, making it appeal to the customer’s preferences in their own local language. It is crucial for businesses to understand that website translation refers to the process of shifting an original language version of web content such as text, multimedia, e-books, or apps into a different language by simply substituting words from one language to another—in context. Experienced digital marketing agencies can help businesses with content localization.

Adapting localization strategies to the online content and deliverables for regional specificity help global brands to ensure a quality customer experience. Website localization is all about refining your message and curating your brand to meet the cultural, functional, and language expectations of your global markets.

Read Also: Website Localization – The Future of Digital Marketing?

Here are a few tips for optimized website localization –

Consider Web Analytics –Along with selecting the right language set, make sure to align with your leadership, sales team, and to mine language insights of your global audience from web analytics data. Make sure to look at the geographic locations from where your visitors most frequently access your website, and also their browser language setting. These two data points can provide significant insights about the languages that your visitors use day-to-day.

Consider Basics –Pay attention to even basic details. Some of them such as punctuation formats, time and date, can have significant impact on how the user perceives. Make sure that your content matches the accepted standards of your target market. For instance, consider whether your target market uses names of months in alphabets or do they prefer numerals? Do they prefer 12-hour standard time format or 24-hour format? Displaying dates and times in the preferred local formats is also recommended as it avoids confusion and allows for an improved user experience.

Offer Diverse Currency & Payment Options –For online E-commerce website, it is really crucial to display prices in the local currency. When users arrive at your site, the last thing they will want to do is convert the prices into values that leads to further decisions. Users in different countries also have different payment preferences such as iDeal in the Netherlands, Alipay and Tenpay in China, while few prefer cash pay delivery.

Create a Style Guide –Creating a style guide will help throughout the localization of your website. Different languages require different fonts and styles.This framework will help the readers understand the written and visual presentation of a company’s content.

Use Advanced Coding and Software –Use Unicode to standardize your website structure. This universal character encoding standard is an ideal way to mix various scripts and languages in a document and exchange documents between people with different locales. . Also consider implementing a multilingual user interface, which helps to change to other languages.

You May Also Like: 6 Benefits of Digital Marketing for Small Businesses

Use Global Design Templates –The need for global consistency will only strengthen, with more and more companies adding languages and local websites. It allows management of a lot of country sites by very few people. It also allows all content managers to use common tools and processes. The global template is easier to manage.For the end user, these templates provide a reliable interface that will help in usability and credibility.

Choose a Reliable Digital Marketing AgencyMake sure to benefit from the services a translator who knows the cultural differences between both the countries, that is your country and the one you’re marketing to. Reputable online marketing agencies provide services from expert translators who stay in or have lived in that country. Such native speakers can pin point the ideas that will work in your advertising campaign. They can assist you with the viewpoint of the local people.

With appropriate planning, an intensive localization strategy along with a skilled LSP partner can help you successfully execute your strategy.

How to do SEO in 2016? [Guide]

 

As usual, more and more SEO changes will hit us in 2016. People still search online for what they want and now more increasingly search is done from mobile phones. Google’s algorithm undergoes dozens of significant changes each year. 2016 will not be different. Let us check the SEO trends that are set to rule search marketing next year. Professional assistance from a digital marketing agency in your area can help you with these changes.

Certain Predictions

• Mobile searches will surpass desktop in 2016 – As already seen the trend is shifting now. Mobile traffic is becoming more and more crucial for ROI.
• Video Content will overtake – Video content could also provide greater ROI than written content in terms of reach, engagement, effectiveness, for brands and industries in the B2C category.
• Greater indexing of social media content – Social media content will get indexed more, as you can already see when you do mobile search for some news item on Google and tweets appear in the search results. Social posts will carry a value and a consideration similar to any independent web page, and the separation of “web” and “social media” will begin to blur even further from an SEO perspective.

Read Also: How to Choose the Right SEO Expert for Your Company

• Aggregated content changes the content marketing game – Twitter Moments is bringing aggregated social media and news content into the picture, which narrows the content marketing field but provides new opportunities as well. News articles must be automatically sourced by Twitter to be visible. Users, whom you target, themselves become content creators and become firsthand witnesses of current events.
• Local search will be given greater specificity – Local search is set to get even more specific, thanks to Google’s local indexes getting even more localized and the arrival of wearable technology such as the Apple Watch. It won’t be long before rankings could be generated in terms of neighborhood rather than city or state.

SEO tactics you need to focus on to continue performing strongly on search engines.

• Keyword Research – Keywords and phrases are still crucial as prospects are using them to find out business, service and products. Keyword research tools such as SEMrush, Keyword Planner from Google, Keyword Analysis Tool for searching the most effective keyword trends in 2016. Also analyzing your own website to check that which keywords are generating more traffic and which are getting more popular. You can use this analysis to find the new related keywords or you can use the same keywords to generate the new content. Reputable digital marketing agencies provide service from experienced SEO analysts who can choose and optimize appropriate keywords based on client’s service.
• On-Page SEO –There has hardly been any changes in the on-page SEO elements over the past couple of years. But, the major goal should be to produce content that is unique and of high-quality. This way, it can meet the needs and expectations of your audience. And like before, it is still crucial to have your keywords in your URL, Title tag, heading tags, Alt image tags and content (3 or 4 times minimum).

Recommended Read: Role of SEO in Brand Awareness

• Mobile SEO – Web designers have already determined that a website needs to load in less than 3 seconds in order to hold the attention of its visitors. For faster accessibility, it is crucial to optimize all the websites for mobile. Mobile search will take reign over desktop in 2016. Google, the search engine giant has put out its own guidebook for brands ready to create a usable and attractive mobile site.
• Link Building – Manual link building cannot be replaced with other marketing strategies. Links have always been an important ranking signal. Quality links can be achieved by asking for backlinks from trust worthy sources, building relationships. Creating testimonials provide a great opportunity to get a backlink and potential traffic from the other site and it usually has a much higher approval rate than your standard link request e-mails. Google Webmaster Tools will help to find out if your link profile could be negatively impacted by low-quality or bad links.
• Content Marketing – Unique, quality content is still crucial. An Online marketing agency with professional content writers can help. Focus on your top keywords while creating content. Blog posts, videos, whitepapers, research report and webinars give people something to link to. In addition, the content you create can rank by itself in the search engines. For example, if you write a blog post on “How to Pick an SEO Company,” there is a possibility it will rank for some of the keywords you use in the title and in the body post, especially if the post gets linked to from other websites or shared a lot on social media. It also helps if your website as a whole already has significant high-quality links.

Adapting changing market trends can be time-consuming for busy professionals. It will be ideal to choose a digital market agency with relevant experience in performing SEO for various industries.

Google Penguin Update Happening Only Next Year

 

Google informed that because of the holidays, the Google Penguin update won’t be released until next year.

A Google spokesperson told, “With the holidays upon us, it looks like the penguins won’t march until next year.”

As soon as Google discovers the links of the site, the Penguin algorithm will analyze those links in real time. And then ranking would be given in almost real time.

Read Also: Google Introduces Fast Loading AMP for Advertising

The update of Google penguin will be done continuously. Hence SEOs and webmasters do not have to wait so longer for the Google to update it.

Penguin 3.0 was the last official update of penguin which was in October 17, 2014

Source(s)

Google’s New Car Loan Calculator Makes Car Payment Easier

 

Google is currently testing a new loan interactive calculator for making car payments easier.

The test was spotted by both Dr. Pete Meyers and Kyle Sanders.

The car loan calculator is similar to the Google’s mortgage calculator  which was launched on February 2015.

The functioning of the calculator is quite easy. One can enter the loan amount, its interest rate and the period of loan. Google gives details regarding monthly payments.

Read Also: Google Introduces Fast Loading AMP for Advertising

One can access the details of maximum amount provided for loan with this feature.

The feature is very much useful to people as they are often confused with the car loan and its payment.

Source(s)

Save Images For Later With the New Google Search!

Google has rolled out a new feature to its revamped image search. Users can now save the images to save them to your collection or to see later.

This Google image search feature works across desktop and mobile and is now available to US searchers also.
Images can be saved to a folder by starring it. To create a folder, just tap the pencil icon and give it a name.
Saved images can be organized to form a collection.

Read Also: Google Introduces Fast Loading AMP for Advertising

In order to review the saved images later, simply click the star icon in the bottom right and pull up the saved files.

iOS and Android users in the US can currently use the feature.
One needs to log into Google account to avail this feature.

Source(s)