5 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Localizing Your Website

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A multinational company’s online performance is dependent on a specialized and localized website. However, it’s easy to miss important elements in the course of such a big project. And unfortunately, misunderstanding or overlooking critical aspects of data can lead to poor outcomes.

Strategically carried-out website localization is a must if you want global success. Let’s see what you mustn’t do when localizing your website.

Not having Unique Content

When it comes to your online presence, unique and high-quality content is essential. That’s especially important once you start website localization in different regions of the world.

You can’t be sure if your content is unique without a good plagiarism checker tool. A tool of this kind helps you avoid duplicate content and search engine penalties that can easily sink your website to the ground.

Content that’s unique to your website increases its value and provides a sense of trustworthiness. Whatever the size of your audience or the specific niche you’re targeting, the most important thing is to keep your site fresh with high-quality, original material.

Moreover, unique content helps with your website domain authority; a website’s ability to rank well in search engines is directly related to its DA. This relates to the website’s trustworthiness, which is directly related to the quality of its content. If your website’s material is original and devoid of plagiarism, you’ll gain more respect.

Not Combining Machine Translation with Post-Editing

How do you localize a website?
Photo Credit: Pixabay

Machine translation has grown into a viable productivity tool for global companies, but relying solely on machine translation might be tricky. The quality of machine translation output greatly depends on the type of content, subject matter, and preferred language pairs.

Your original content’s tone of voice and context will be best preserved when you apply machine translation post-editing (MTPE). In other words, a professional linguist needs to review and edit the translated content to make sure there are no mistakes. This is required for anything that must be understood verbatim, such as a blog. 

Not Considering Multilingual SEO

The practice of optimizing your website for multiple languages is known as multilingual SEO. It caters to clients from across the globe. As a result, your website will attract visitors from all corners of the internet.

Professional multilingual SEO can help you better show your website’s content to a wider range of users. In many places of the world, English is used as both a primary and a secondary language by internet users. However, many people feel more at ease when they can access a website in their native tongue.

Creating Content that doesn’t Support Diversity

It’s essential to prioritize diversity and inclusion efforts if you want to convince a large number of people from different parts of the world to build relationships with and make purchases from your company. This is true for the language that you employ, the accessibility that you make available, as well as the visuals that you select.

Your clients want to be able to “see themselves” in the content you provide. They have to be able to picture themselves making use of your goods or services in order to be interested.

As a result, it’s absolutely necessary to select your photos and videos with care, ensuring that appropriate representation is maintained across all demographics that comprise your target audience.

Also, make sure to take into account the cultural norms and nuances of the areas you are localizing for so that you don’t upset members of the audience with visuals that reflect cultural taboos.

What are the major issues in localizing Web pages?
Photo Credit: Pixabay

Not Being Careful with Promos

Businesses frequently make the error of using the same marketing strategies in their new market as they did in their previous market, which can be detrimental to their success.

The trouble with this is that different markets may react differently, therefore you’ll need to adapt your strategies to fit each individual market. This includes the intended listeners, the channel, and the content.

The major reason behind this is that politics is a highly individualistic and emotionally charged construct. Each nation has a unique relationship with the international political community.

In some places, the political themes that your brand mentions or stands for in its source content may be offensive or even illegal. Avoid making this error by excluding politics from your content entirely.

Promotion on social media platforms is an excellent illustration of this. Even though Facebook is the most popular social platform on the planet, not every industry can benefit from using it.

In Russia, a social network known as VKontakte has nearly completely cornered the market, whereas Facebook’s presence there is virtually nonexistent.

Facebook and Twitter are both blocked in China, but WeChat and Webo are two of the country’s most widely used social media platforms.

The promotional message that you send out will also be different depending on whatever channel is being used, as will the target audience for that channel.

It’s very important to keep that in mind. If you need to switch from the channels that are common in your area, do it. It’s important to deliver your message properly to your customers.

Final Words

Localizing your website is a significant step toward expanding internationally. However, the process is complex and filled with problems if you don’t conduct adequate research. Avoiding the mistakes described above will go a long way toward ensuring a good localization. Are you wondering what other fashionable items are missing from your closet? You can learn all about the latest and greatest accessories by reading our previously-published content 5elifestyle Bookmark us for even more content in the future.


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