At MotionPoint, we believe there are several key steps companies can take to expand their online business into new international markets. The first two make plenty of sense: confirm you can fulfill overseas orders, and select high-value overseas markets. From the start, you must ensure you can get your products to the people who want them the most.
By our reckoning, the third step is to present your company’s website to new global audiences in the languages they prefer to read and speak—which often isn’t English. Most businesses believe this is where the adventure concludes, and the profits begin. After all, the website is translated, and in-market. Customers will surely discover the site, visit, and transact.
That might’ve been true a decade ago, but not anymore. Through our industry-leading experience, we’ve seen that translation, while very important, is ultimately an entry point to achieving increased engagement and revenue. In the parlance of card games, website translation represents the “table stakes”—the price of admission—to meaningfully connect with new customers.
(Thankfully, MotionPoint’s platform delivers website translation efficiently and affordably, making our solution’s total cost of ownership the lowest in our industry.)
Indeed, we believe that translation is a component of a larger suite of technologies and methodologies that work together to ensure that consumers who are looking for your products and services actually find them. It’s a great big Internet. Discoverability is an ongoing challenge for many businesses. You undoubtedly know how important Search Engine Optimization has been to the discoverability, sales and success of your company’s domestic website. SEO is just as important for your international endeavors. A translated website serving a global market should also leverage these best practices, and present them in your new audience’s language of choice.
In fact, there are other powerful “under the hood” tweaks you’ll want to make to ensure your new customers find your site, including:
- “Alternate language” tags for browser detection
- Ensuring on-site search works for alternate language searches
- And much more
Even your site’s e-commerce experience should be optimized for international visitors. It should easily accommodate local payment options, and understand international shipping requirements —and exclude U.S.-exclusive shipping information (such as ZIP code fields).
These are non-obvious—but mission-critical—tasks that work in concert to deliver the kind of international discoverability, engagement and sales your business deserves. And candidly, these tasks can add up, either in financial expense or effort, if your IT team tries to do them itself.
Thankfully, MotionPoint’s platform and technologies do all of these things—and more—for our customers. We translate your content, disseminate your in-language website to the proper regional and international search engines, make it enticing for search via SEO and other proprietary methods, and finally ensure your new customers can effortlessly navigate and make purchases from the new site(s).
Would you like to learn how to get a head start on your competition in 2017 and reach brand-new consumers in 2017? Contact us for more information. We’ll provide actionable information and insights that can expand your business, and diversify your revenue streams. And we can deploy your translated global website in 90 days or less.
Last updated on December 19, 2016
