We live in an age defined by mass globalisation, where entering and expanding into new markets has never been more accessible. Advances in technology, developments in societies, as well as huge investments in foreign direct investment by countries has brought about this phenomenon, and more specifically – the rise of the global, and digital consumer.
With the internet and e-commerce being the main drivers of these increasing levels of connectedness, the importance of your website to be privy to this global market becomes clear. As it happens, your website is more-than-not the first indication and impression that consumers get of you and your brand, meaning having a top-notch website should be at the forefront of your priorities.
Of course, delivering an impressive website comes down to a number of factors. You’re probably already aware of the importance of a striking design and so have opted for one of Sonaar’s premium WordPress themes. One thing you may not have thought of however, is the importance of a multilingual website. So, in this article we’re going to discuss why translating your brand website is becoming a must, and how you can do so.
Benefits of a Multilanguage Site
Expanding Your Brand Reach
Whether you’re a solo artist, a band, podcaster, or anything else for that matter, translating your brand website will undoubtedly help you reach out to new audiences across the globe. Let’s say for talks sake, your website is only available in English. Based on the figures below, this is the native language of only just over 25% of internet users. If you’ve got international ambition, it’s definitely worth investing in translation to make your brand discoverable to a greater percentage of users. The reality is that we live in a world where many people are open to experiencing things in foreign languages, you need think only of the global appeal of French cinema, the rise in popularity of K-pop in the western world, and much more.
Source: Statista
Say perhaps you’ve your brand site in Spanish and produce Spanish music, you may be thinking, what’s the point of translating? Well, as it turns out, 49% of Americans listen to music in languages other than English, meaning that not translating could result in the loss of potential fans and listeners. Furthermore, podcasts are often used by foreign language speakers as learning tools to help them gain proficiency in other languages. As a result, taking the simple step to translate your site could bring about a significant increase in traffic and listeners.
Increasing Your Sales and Revenue
Whether you’re selling EP’s, albums, merch, or generating revenue through site advertising, translating your website is set to bring about an increase in your sales or revenue. This follows logically from the last point, if more people are visiting your site, the more people likely to purchase your offering.
A big consideration for anyone purchasing online is understanding the purchasing conditions, and of course, if all of this is in a foreign language, chances are they won’t be confident in their purchase. According to the CSA 72.4% of consumers said they would be more likely to buy a product with information in their own language, which is a huge indicator that you should consider translating your site.
Making Your Fans Feel Valued
Let’s face it, there’s no higher form of personalization than translation. Presenting your offering in the native language of your customers or fans is not only wise from a commercial standpoint, but also from a personal point of view. Going the extra mile to provide a multilingual site will show your fans across the world that you appreciate them and care about their needs.
This can also build up a great brand reputation, fans feeling acknowledged and valued translate this appreciation into further support of your brand and offering.
Competitive Advantage
Making it big in the music or podcasting industry is a tough ask for anyone, so it’s wise to take every opportunity you can to gain an advantage over your competitors. A multilingual website is one of these opportunities to avail of, and is surprisingly an underexploited one at that.
For the aforementioned reasons, it can not only boost traffic and revenues, but also presents a way to differentiate yourself from others in the industry which can only be a good thing in an increasingly competitive field.
SEO Purposes
If you’re not particularly tech savvy, SEO or ‘Search Engine Optimization’ is one of the most important considerations for any website and is one of the biggest determinants of discoverability and consequential success.
Having an SEO optimized website results in your website ranking higher in organic search engine result pages. If you’re wondering why it’s so important, think of yourself when you make an arbitrary search on Google. Are you likely to look past the first page of results? In fact, research from Hubspot shows that 75% of searchers don’t look past the first page of results! So, ranking is as high as possible is most definitely a key consideration for your brand.
So, what happens when you’re trying to attract fans and listeners from other countries who search in different languages? Well, there’s this thing called International SEO, and essentially it involves everything you’d normally do for domestic level SEO, but in the foreign language. So, the proper steps for killing SEO on an international level would be to translate the entirety of your site’s content, in addition to any metadata. Language specific subdomains or subdirectories are also highly recommended.
Taking all these steps on board will mean your site is indexed following International SEO best practices and makes it easily crawlable for search engine bots, resulting in higher page rankings! While it may seem like a complicated endeavour, luckily there are a number of WordPress translation plugins out there, such as Weglot, that both translate your website and automatically index your pages following international SEO best practices – helping you with the full localization process.
Effective Marketing
Whether you’re an established brand, or an emerging prospect in your respective industry, the reality is that your marketing efforts are hugely important to sustain or grasp some traction. Often, brands look directly to advertising campaigns as a means of building awareness, but the cost of this can sometimes be off-putting.
However, it’s important to not overlook the power of your website as a marketing tool. Being quite often the first point of reference for your visitors, fans, and followers it wields a great deal of influence and power.
Marketing efforts pushed on your website are a great way to reach lots of individuals and has the added benefit of being extremely cost efficient. DemandMetric states that content marketing on your site generates approximately 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing methods all the while costing 62% less! With this in mind, a multilingual site looks like a great option when considering your international marketing strategy.
How Can I Translate My Website?
Now that you’ve seen the multitude of benefits you can reap from a multilingual website, you’re probably wondering – how can I translate my own brand’s site?
Of course, there are a number of options out there to help you on your multilingual journey. When talking generally about translations, there are two options available:
- Human translations: One option you may consider is human translations. This usually involves hiring professional translators to translate your website page by page. Of course, going for this option may be a good choice in terms of translation accuracy.
However, the cost of this should also be factored into your decision. If you’ve many webpages on your site this can quickly become an expensive choice. You also need to consider the technical aspects behind a multilingual website, professional translators won’t be able to help you to integrate and display the translations on your site. You also need to consider how easy it will be to update or edit translations.
- Machine translation: Alternatively, machine translation is a popular choice for multilingual projects. Although there is skepticism around this option, automatic machine translation is shown to be improving in accuracy and can be a cost and time efficient translation solution.
Fortunately, the Weglot WordPress plugin takes a hybrid approach to multilingual projects combining neural machine translation with post human translation editing – giving you control of the translation quality. This gives you the best of both worlds in terms of cost efficiency and accuracy, allowing you to have your content automatically translated in the desired language and simply have it manually edited by you, your team or human translators if you so wish.
Translate Your Brand Website in 5 steps with Weglot
- Find the Weglot plugin on WordPress
On your WordPress admin dashboard, scroll along the sidebar to where you find ‘’Plugins’’, click ‘’Add new’’, a search bar will appear, type ‘’Weglot’’ and search.
- Install and activate the Weglot translation plugin
After this, Weglot will appear as the first result. Click ‘’Install Now’’. When installation is completed (it should take no longer than a few seconds), you’ll be then prompted to activate the plugin. Click ‘’Activate’’.
- Finalize your Weglot configuration
You will then see a new Weglot tab along the sidebar of your WordPress dashboard. You’ll need to click on this tab to finalise your configuration.
- Enter your API Key & Choose the Original and Destination Language(s)
The configuration process comes to an end at this page. What you need to do is copy and paste your unique API key. This is available on your Weglot account dashboard (you’ll have to login or create an account to get access to this).
Once the API key is pasted in, all you need to do is select the original site of your website, and then the destination language(s). (i.e. the language(s) you want to translate your site into). When this is done, click ‘’Save Changes’’.
- Your multilingual site is live
Once these changes have been saved, go onto your website and notice the language switcher. Your site is now completely multilingual. At this point, you also have the option of customising your language switcher to change its position on your site or by changing how it looks – within the Weglot tab on your WordPress dashboard. You also have the option to make use of other advanced features such as ‘’Translation Exclusion’’ which allows you to choose pages or specific parts of your site that shouldn’t be translated.
Interested in trying Weglot on your website? Sign up for their 10-day free trial.
What makes Weglot a great translation solution?
When it comes to translating your brand website, Weglot offers the most comprehensive, user-friendly, and intuitive solution on the translations market. Some key features include:
- Installation: Unlike other options, Weglot is a no code solution making it extremely user friendly. It auto detects all of your content,no matter where it’s coming from (even from another plugin) and you can have your multilingual site up and running in minutes.
- Translation Management: Weglot uses automatic translation to quickly translate your site first time around. However, you can then manually edit translations or order professional translations via the Weglot dashboard, if further verification is required. Furthermore, the translation management features include a ‘’visual editor’’ which allows you to edit translations in a live preview of your website.
- SEO Optimised: Weglot is an SEO optimised solution meaning that all your content is indexed following Google best practices. It translates all of your metadata and automatically adds hreflang tags, meaning that your international SEO is covered, allowing you to gain increased international traffic.
- Customer Support: Weglot has a rigorous support team who will respond to any query within one business day and work quickly to find solutions to any issues you may experience.
Conclusion
Translating your brand website is a must in the digital world we live in and can bring about great benefits if done correctly. Fortunately, it’s never been easier to do so thanks to multilingual plugins such as Weglot.
Why not try out Weglot’s 10 day free trial and see how it can help you increase traffic and growth on your brand’s website!
