Multilingual Web Marketing: a whole new world of opportunity!

Posted by admin in Multilingual Web Marketing on December 16, 2007

Today I want to ask you a couple of questions: are your online sales currently slow or disappointing? Despairing of gaining an advantage over the mass of competition out there? I understand the feeling! But have you ever considered how many websites are available in languages other than English? Amazingly the current figure is still less than 5%, yet there is a constantly growing demand in other countries for the information and products on offer!

Non-English online markets are growing at a much faster rate than English speaking ones as the Internet continues to penetrate the world at an astonishing speed. The world total of Internet users has now passed the one billion mark yet only 30% are English speakers. That’s right, 70% of Internet users are non-English speakers! Let’s take a little closer look at the current most popular languages after English. Chinese comes in second with 132 million users, then Japanese with 86 million, Spanish 80 million, German 56 million, French 40 million, Korean 34 million, Portuguese 32 million, Italian 29 million and Russian with 24 million users.

When you look at this list you can see that it includes some of the richest and most developed (and developing) nations in the world. Wouldn’t you like to take yourself out of the increasing loop of competition in the United States, Canada, Britain etc. and just plug yourself straight into these wealthy and ever expanding new markets? And don’t forget, there is always a delay between something being developed in the English speaking world and its take up elsewhere. In France for example, this delay can be up to six months afterwards. This is where Internet entrepreneurs who have the foresight to translate their products and websites first will gather the rewards. And in the process establish market dominance for any other products at a later date.

With a translated website you also have some major search engine advantages which I have not yet covered. The primary advantage is that your search engine listings will multiply! If you translate your site into just one other language your listings will double, and quadruple if you translate into four for example. The more you translate, you more listings you get. Search engines will visit your website more frequently as they can detect that your pages are written in different languages. You will not only get listed in all the language specific versions of the major search engines and their feeds, but local country specific ones as well.

Having multilingual versions of a website also makes it a lot easier to gain better search engine rankings. Most English only websites are now fully optimized and the competition is advancing all the time. Foreign language SEO is still in its infancy however and your website still has time to gain a high rank with a minimum of time and investment. But time is running out! A good ranking in a major non-English language search engine or version of Google can generate a huge number of hits.

Is Google AdSense an important element of your website and domain monetization strategy? Have you ever thought about exploiting its multilingual capabilities? AdSense automatically detects the languages of your web pages and displays the corresponding adverts in up to 21 different languages.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the only really safe way to improve the performance of traffic script generated or doorway pages is to have them translated into other languages. This is because search engine filter algorithms are currently a lot less developed when dealing with non-English pages.

Given the amount of English language competition on the Internet translation may well be the only competitive advantage that you have left. Don’t waste it! In business you have to put all the advantages your way that you possibly can and having a multilingual website is the key to stepping over the competition and establishing a solid base for the future of your business.

Tags: Chinese, English, French, German, Internet, Italian, Japanese, Korean, languages, Marketing, Multilingual, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Web