In this day and age, people spend significantly more time on the web than ever before, searching for answers to trivial questions, looking for services that can cater to their needs, making random purchases, or just seeking entertainment outlets to color the dull landscape of their daily lives.
All of these things people seek can be found in an instant by using search engines and delving deeper into the digital labyrinth of the ever-growing worldwide web, regardless of where one's location or the language spoken.
In the context of digital marketing, American-Austrian consultant Peter Drucker highlights the potency of search engines as means of increasing the exposure of any business product in his famous quote,
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
So what better way is there to deliver this information to a potential customer in a modern environment than with a well-built and digitally-exposed website?
Global Internet usage
As the potential of the web continues to grow exponentially, businesses take advantage of this, which results in an ever-increasing competition on the digital landscape.
Without a structure to the web, the average user would be lost and become clueless as to where to find what.
Search engines tackle this problem by creating a structure of the web and providing relevant answers (search queries) to us (users).
For this to work, a search engine has to take the following steps to provide us with these relevant answers:
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1) Crawl – search engine explores the internet for content and scans (parses) the code and content of each website URL they find.
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2) Index – the indexing process involves storage, assessment, and organization of the crawled content, which will be displayed later on in the users' search queries.
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3) Rank – provides a user with pieces of content that best match his/her search queries by ordering the most relevant results first and the least relevant last.
To be found and rank high in a search engine, your website has to be relevant to that specific search query, and, ideally, on top of that search result. Your website being in the top position of a search result will maximize the chances that a user will organically (without you paying money for it) visit your website.
However, how can you increase the probability of that happening when there are so many websites on the web competing with one another for a top position in the search result list?
That’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play.
1) Gain new organic traffic
by localizing your website into a new language, you add a whole new set of keyword combinations to it.
The localized website version, as a result, exposes it towards a new traffic stream of users by allowing them to find you via a search engine through relevant search queries made in their native language.
There can be a plethora of reasons as to why those users weren’t there in the first place, but the main reason is – they were searching for something in their language, and your website didn’t have that.
"They were searching for something in their language, and your website didn’t have that."
Organic traffic Pre-Localization and Post-Localization
Impact on Session duration as a result of User Experience (UX) Improvement
4) Become more exposed to new backlinks
A backlink is a term describing the process when someone creates a link on their website and points it towards your website. In a nutshell, this is how the web basically works.
Imagine this: your website features an excellent article on a particularly sophisticated subject that many people find very useful and read a lot. Perhaps that topic is quite thoroughly discussed in your home country; however, on the opposite side of the globe, that topic is barely touched upon. The next best thing to do is to translate that excellent article of yours into that other language.
The translation of your article will, therefore, allow speakers of that other language to find it, read it, like it, share it, and create backlinks to it, which in return will boost your SEO not only for the new language your website and article was localized into but also for your existing source language. Your Domain Authority (more on that later) score will inherently get a boost as well.
5) Enhance your Domain Authority
In order to be found on the web, someone has to point at you and say – look, there they are (ideally, that someone has to be big, tall, respectable, and with a loud voice so that more people can hear that message). While this may sound silly, in essence, this is what a Domain Authority is.
According to Moz -
Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). Domain Authority is calculated by evaluating multiple factors, including linking root domains and a number of total links into a single DA score. This score can then be used when comparing websites or tracking the ‘ranking strength’ of a website over time.”
While Domain Authority is not an official indicator used by major search engines, it is more of a combination of all factors of the SEO that are shown in the form of a score, which produces a strong indication of how well a particular website ranks or will rank soon.
Domain authority ranks from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the better your overall SEO.
By combining all of the above beneficial points of localizing your website, you will gain new DA points where previously none have existed. Higher traffic, better user experience, higher conversion rates, new backlinks – all of these will boost your website’s DA and benefit both old language and new language contents.
