Do Your Customers Speak English?
Are you unknowingly restricting your market to more than half
of your potential customer base? Are you alienating an important
number of your visitors? If, your site is only in English and
not translated in other key languages, you undoubtedly are! Did
you know that as of 2005, around 300M users accessed the
Internet in English, while almost 700M users accessed it in
another language? If we were to make a crude assessment,
strictly English localized website are loosing 70% of their
potential customer base from the start. To be more specific, the
top ten languages used in the Internet, are in order, English,
Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Korean, Portuguese,
Italian and Russian (internetworldstats). Even in the
United-States, over 45M users access the Internet from home in
another language than English, Spanish being the main language
with over 26M users. The major companies recognize this
situation and offer their website in different languages, some
even going to the length of implementing specifically targeted
version of their website, based on the target language. However,
many websites or small business are neglecting this aspect, and
hence loosing out on a chance of increasing their market simply
by not repeating the same thing! Ironically, it's the smaller
companies that should use the benefits of an easy and affordable
method of increasing their customer base.
So, what do I do now? Well, first you must determine the
potential market your website service or product should target.
Indeed, the necessity to translate your website in certain
languages may be constrained if your site usability is confined
to specific regions. Another good thing to do is to determine
the specific web pages that need to be translated. Opening your
website to the world doesn't require the translation of your
entire website. If your site has a page that promotes the
Whistler Mountain in BC Canada to snowboarders, there is
probably no need to translate it in certain languages, as some
markets would not be concerned. Once you have established the
languages worthwhile for your site to be translated into, you
should then have a website like eWebSolving.com translate
your content. This affordable service will increase the audience
for your business and undoubtedly generate more conversions.