Localising your website: in 9 easy steps

Localisation is the process of adapting your texts to the socio-cultural context of your new market. It addresses all the non-textual components of the translation:

• Purpose
• Specificity of your target audience and their needs
• SEO requirements
• UX/UI aspects

And many other issues.

After localisation, your website should sound natural to your customers. It should be easy to read, by being fully compliant with the way your clients normally communicate.

So with that, let’s consider the nine steps to localising your website well.

Step 1: Preparation

The decision to translate and localise your website should be well considered. You may have decided to internationalise your company to conquer other markets, which is the most obvious reason behind localising your website. If you may be observing an increase in traffic from other countries (by Google Analytics or any other web analytics tool), then this may be a good time to consider translating and localising your website.

The second thing to consider is what you actually need to localise. Some companies just localise crucial elements and subpages on their websites. This is not always a good idea, as it unwittingly creates a sense of inconsistency, which clients may assume relates to your business. If you are working on specific landing pages, it is often good to test the new market potential on a small scale. For example, you can start with specific product pages to test ads and other elements related to the local market.

In general, the safest option is to localise all of your website-related elements, but this may depend on many factors, such as market, available resources, deadlines, business objectives, and technical content (see Step 4).

OTHER THINGS TO CONSIDER

As a part of the preparation process, you need to consider a number of basic factors:

• Your product or service: Can you simply start offering your products/services in the new market, or maybe you need to adapt them to it?
• Pricing: Will your pricing model still work in the new market?
• Target market(s): What languages, cultures and demographic groups do you want to communicate with?
• Team: Do you have the resources to help you with the localisation of your website? Perhaps there are employees on your team who can serve the new clients or other specialists knowledgeable about the new target market – you can use them in the process.

There may be more, depending on your business profile and needs

Finally, think about the desired form of this service. For the sake of simplicity, we present the three most common options to choose from, although in reality there may be more:

1. Human translation and localisation: the whole process is done by human translators and localisation specialists, with limited support in the form of CAT tools.
2. Machine translation: the whole process is done automatically using MT tools. There are also plenty of “free” tools available for this matter, but we will discuss them in some other posts.
3. Hybrid solution: this includes both machine and human work – the base is done by the MT tool and then edited and improved by human specialists.

If you are after a truly natural “feel” for your website, you should concentrate on the first or third option.

Step 2: Understand the customer requirements

You cannot really localise your website if you do not know who your target audience will be. Specific groups within a country often use different forms of communication, dialects or even languages. You need to know if that is the case before you start the process.

Understanding customer requirements starts with creating a buyer persona. This is a representation or an archetype of your ideal customer. Buyer personas comprise the basic demographic information about your target customers, as well as their behaviours, motivations, intents and pain points.

In order to create a buyer persona, you need to gather more information about your future market and, ideally, get some solid data from your analytic tools. You can also use market reports and whitepapers to understand your target market better.

Unless you have just started your business, by the time you start localising your website in another language, you probably already have a sense of your current buyer profile – so that knowledge should be used when aiming for these new markets.

Another important way to understand your target market is through keyword research (see Step 4).

Step 3: Create a team and find an LSP

Achieving good localisation is never a one-player game. It is a process that should involve a number of people from your company, including:

• Marketing
• Customer service/sales
• Website maintenance, especially for custom-made solutions
• Creator of best solutions

Each of these roles has a different perspective when it comes to the objectives and their fulfilment. Make sure there is someone responsible for setting and maintaining the project scope. With the help of technical support, you should be able to extract texts for expert localization that can be used for the quoting process, whether this is done internally or by third parties. When this is not possible, web scraping methods can be applied.

If you are considering website localisation, it means you already have a website in place, so deciding what solution you need to use is easy. It could be WordPress, Shopify, Drupal, Wix or anything else – each of them having their own constraints.

It is usually a good idea to work with a company that can help you translate and localise your website. Such companies, known as LSPs, work with specialists who understand the target language and culture inside out. These include native proofreaders and experienced translators. They can provide a comprehensive service that includes planning, consultancy, research, localising and proofreading for all of your marketing texts, including technical support and final testing.

Here at Skrivanek, when we localise website content, we always ask the client about the general tone we should use. This means that your translated website remains fully compliant with your expectations. This is the kind of practice that all LSPs should follow.

Step 4: Take SEO and metadata into consideration

While all texts on your website are crucial, there is more to consider in the translation and localisation processes. There are website-related elements that are used by Google bots and other search engine crawlers to understand what your website is about, such as:

• Meta titles (title tags): these are displayed in Google (in the SERP) as the titles for the links to your website (so users see them only if you have a good organic position).
• Meta descriptions: these briefly summarise the content of a web page, and are also displayed in the SERP.
• ALT attributes: these small pieces of content describe what can be seen in all the graphics, images and photos you publish on your website.

Did you know that emoji signs can now be used in meta descriptions, as well as featured images?