How to attract global traffic to your website

If you regularly look at Google Analytics to assess the geographic location of traffic coming to your website, then chances are you’re already getting traffic from non-English speaking countries. Even if you aren’t, you still want to consider taking solid steps towards attracting more global traffic for two reasons:

1. More sales channels create more revenue opportunities.
2. Your website will have more traffic and more searches, which in turn increases your Google ranking. The higher your Google ranking, the more traffic you attract, which increases your potential revenue generation.

Translating your website can attract more global traffic to your website. Not only does it address potential customers in their native languages, but translation also addresses currency and regulatory issues that pertain to specific countries.

Here are key questions to consider when translating your website:

What’s My Target International Audience?

Google’s keyword planner can identify the search engine potential of various keywords related to your business in foreign countries. Significant organic traffic from countries for your specific keywords indicates your potential target audience.

Do I Want to Translate for a Country, a Language, or Both?

In most cases, the best approach is to translate to another language if your products and services do not change based on location. If they do change, then you want to target the country. If you translate to a specific language, but if a particular country has certain restrictions or requirements different from that of other countries that share the native language, then you want to do both.

Do I Code This Myself or Hire a Web Developer?

Beyond doing the actual translation, converting your website into another language requires recoding the site, not only to ensure pages are accessible to targeted markets but that it abides by Google rules. If the coding is done incorrectly, it could result in Google treating it as automatically-generated duplicate content designed to attract traffic without providing meaningful content to users. This is considered a “cheat,” and in such cases, Google penalizes your search ranking. This defeats one of the reasons for translating your site in the first place.

You need to be aware of the complexities of structuring your website and applying various tags to your pages to ensure this doesn’t happen. If you are not proficient in website design, consider hiring an experienced web designer.

Should I Use Google Translate to Convert My Website?

No. Google Translate is designed for word-for-word substitution. It doesn’t understand context or meaning. The risks are two-fold:

1. The translation is awkward, contains errors and is often incoherent. The traffic that does come to your site quickly leaves it.
2. Inaccurate translation of meta tags and keywords can result in Google treating the pages as duplicate content, resulting in search ranking penalties.

Should I Hire a Translation Service?

Yes. A professional translation service ensures the content is fluent and relevant to your foreign target audience. More importantly, it ensures the content is not penalized by Google as a duplicate. A translation service can also help manage the technical aspects of website construction to properly tag and index your pages and ensure your keywords are relevant.

How Has Translation Helped Other Sites

Neil Patel explains how he increased traffic to his own site thanks to properly translated content. A month after he published his first article in Portuguese, his traffic increased from some 100,493 unique visitors to 144,196. He subsequently added German and Spanish translations. By mid-2018, in addition to his normal traffic in the English language, the site had 173,772 Portuguese visitors, 45,772 German visitors, and 79,388 Spanish visitors. Making these changes generated over a million dollars in yearly revenue.

Contact BURG Translations to discuss your website translation needs to attract more global traffic. We provide the languages you need to grow your business.