Improving Your Ranking by Translating Your Content

As a business owner, you have a need to reach a target audience in your local area; however, depending on what you do and what you offer, you may also  wish to market your brand on a wider scope. If you have international capabilities, you will want to determine if translating your content helps your search engine rankings overall.

The purposes of widening your scope

As you think about your business (and your content, in particular), you will want to figure out if you are doing everything possible to reach your target audience. If you aren’t doing everything possible (you have a sense that there is a lot more that you can do for your business and your brand), you may want to think more on a global scale. Of course, if you are an astute business person, you are probably paying close attention to search engine optimization as well as how your business is ranking on the search engine pages. Perhaps, now it is time to consider trying to reach a larger target audience, one that includes target audience members from around the world. Of course, you should only do that it you believe that it will have a positive impact on the success of your business.

If the answer to that question is yes, you should consider translating your content into different languages in an effort to reach many more people. That is an excellent way to build your professional reputation. The truth of the matter is that all people have the potential to find your content interesting, valuable, compelling, and educational.

You must develop relationships with the members of your target audience.

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Once you have established relationships, you will begin to really get to know each other and to begin to understand the wants and needs of the other person. 

How advantageous will your website be if it offers content in several languages?

To many people who own a variety of businesses, offering content in several different languages is something that must be offered. As much as we would like to believe it, unfortunately, there are many people in the world who don’t speak or understand English. As a business owner, one of your principle motivators is that you are able to solve the other person’s problems. Well, if you write content in a language that the other person doesn’t understand, that is definitely a problem. Nowadays, the cultural, language barriers are not as clearly defined as they were in the past so offering your content in many different languages is not only a good idea but it is expected in many situations.

If you bother to translate your content to accommodate many different people around the world, it speaks volumes. It says that your online connections are very important to you and to your business, which is why you went to the trouble of making sure that their needs and wants are satisfied to the best of your ability. If you do that, you are saying that you are putting the other person above you and that you will do whatever you can to help that person. 

At this point, you may be wondering how to go about translating your content.

• Determine which international markets you wish to target: Before you can translate anything,  you will need to figure out which countries you need to target. Once you have narrowed that down, you can decide into which languages to translate your content. When it comes to choosing the specific content that you want to translate, that will depend on the needs and wants of your target audience. You should come up with a series of pertinent questions and answers (based on your target audience members). Of course, being prepared in advance is very important for you and it will make everything run smoothly.

• Concentrate on cultural features: The cultural features that exist in that particular country are extremely important for your success with that particular group of people in that particular country. If you can bridge those cultural differences, you will be able to establish successful relationships. As is always the case, without a solid relationship, you will not be able to make any progress with the other person. 

• Make the right SEO choices: SEO is extremely important for your business and what you choose to optimize will have a tremendous impact on your business’s success. It is important to remember that your SEO choices may not be the same for every language into which your content is translated. A lot of that depends on keywords and key phrases, which, of course, are potentially different in each language. Translating your content will require quite a bit of effort on your part but it will be well worth it when you see the results. Your efforts will definitely pay off.

• Choose the most skilled and creative translators: It is probably clear that you will not be doing the translating yourself. That means that you will have to work with someone else to do the translating. When it comes to making that choice, you will want to choose a translator that not only has an excellent command of both languages but also has a keen sense of business/marketing principles and nuances. If you try to save money on the translating end, you may regret it. Somethings are worth paying for and this is definitely one of them.

Conclusion

Your translated content must not only be translated using language that is smooth and error free but it must also convey your messaging perfectly. There should be absolutely no gap because of the translation. What you want to happen is that your content appears seamless and everyone in every country understands it in exactly the same way. Of course, it is also critical to use humans to translate your content. Using software may seem like it does a good job, but it will miss a lot of the subtleties that only the human brain can capture. It is also important to understand that you can pick and choose what you want to have translated. You will want to share the most compelling, valuable and most relevant content with all of your colleagues.

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