Introduction.

The digital era has completely revolutionised the way we reach our target audience. Internet allows us to reach all of them regardless of their location, but their needs, consumer habits, tastes and language are very different. In this article we will show you some tips for website internationalisation

Our website is our letter of introduction to the world and nowadays it is an indispensable, if not obligatory, requirement for all those companies that want to continue to be present in the commercial future to have a website adapted to an international level.

Nearly 80% of people go online to search for information about a product or service before making a final purchase, and more than 68% of consumers worldwide made an online purchase from a shop located outside their home country in 2020 (data from the American Pantry study, published by Deloitte).

This data underlines the importance of having a well-designed, structured and adapted website for online sales in other countries.

Our website must have an international perspective, yes, but the free Google Translate service is not enough. Success will be found in differentiation and detail.

We must not forget to adapt to each of the markets we are going to address. From the content we publish, payment methods and viewing experience of each user who will visit our website.

In addition, we must take into account that users not only access our website from their personal computers, we must take into account the intensive use of smartphones, which have become an extension of our body.

The Internet can facilitate the development of our business internationally and our website is one of the tools to achieve this, but we must know how to do it.

Today we bring you 5 MUST-HAVE keys to successfully internationalise your website:

Overall web design.

First of all you must review the design of your website. Finding a single acceptable design at an international level is a very complicated task, a user in Spain and another in China do not have the same tastes and visual preferences.

You can adapt the web design to each region or culture you are targeting. You will get your message across in a much more personalised way but you will have to spend a lot of time researching each design and a considerable investment of money.

The other option is to develop a single web design and make small adaptations, in language and content, depending on the country you are targeting. This will strengthen your company’s brand image on an international level, but keep in mind that the choice of colours and style must be maintained in each country you are targeting and be visually acceptable to all users who enter the website.

Choosing the structure of the website.

The decision to choose one design or another is linked to the choice of the structure of our website and this will also depend on the needs and objectives of our company.

We can have a single domain (ourweb.com), create one for each of the countries we want to address (for Spain .es, for Russia .ru, for China .cn and so on) or several subdomains within our main domain.
The option of creating a domain per country is much more versatile but it involves a heavy investment in time and work in your SEO positioning strategy.

On the other hand, if you prefer to implement a structure with subdomains, all the work you develop in your SEO positioning strategy will be used to the maximum but the maintenance work will be greater.


Include localised content.

All the content of your website must be adapted to the target markets and we are not only referring to the language. The tone and cultural expressions are very important when adapting the content of our website.

A clear example of this can be found if we compare our country with any other in Latin America. We all speak Spanish but our way of communicating is not similar.

It is very important to develop localised content for each country or region we are going to target, which is why it is vital to have a person within our team who translates and adapts all the content of your website.

This action will not go unnoticed by users from different countries, on the contrary, they will value positively that the total content of your website, from the product description, the drop-down menu or the contact tab, include their local expressions.

Develop an international SEO strategy.

It is very likely that you already have an SEO strategy for your local or maybe national market, however, this changes if we extend the range to an international level.

The ultimate goal is to appear on the first page of results in the main search engines used by different users.

We emphasise different search engines, because although Google is the most used in most of the world, there are countries that have their own. This is the case of Russia with “Yandex” or China with “Baidu”.

Developing a good SEO positioning of our website will help us to consolidate our brand image and increase our competitiveness against the rest of our international competitors.

Include the right keywords.

This goes hand in hand with the international SEO strategy, we cannot create one without the other, both are necessary for success when internationalising our website.

Keywords are essential to position our website in the different search engines. Their aim is to help users find the product or service they have in mind.

We need to select the keywords of our website very well and do not forget that the most searched words in our market do not necessarily have to be the same in the rest of the countries that are the object of our strategy.

Our recommendation is that you make a list of the keywords that you currently use to position your website, translate them and adapt them to the language of each market you are going to target. Then you should analyse all the selected words and choose those that have the highest traffic in search engines (Google Analytics is a free tool that can help you get started).

Conclusion.

There is no doubt that there is an increasing need to be present digitally and internationally to remain present in the market and your website is one of the necessary pillars for its development and expansion.

The online internationalisation of our company can be a great economic benefit but the lack of a specific and studied strategy to enhance the results and impact of our digital actions could be costly if we do not know how to do it.

The keys we give you can help you to start the internationalisation of your website or to improve it, but if you need professional help you can count on an external agency like Altas.

We offer you our experience and great team of professionals that will help you to successfully approach the different international markets. Contact us!

Newsletter
© Copyright 2023 Atlas. All rights reserved.
close