- By Camila Ante
On your website you have already developed the brand, optimized the visibility for search, generated attractive content and facilitated navigation for your local audience. Now, how can you create an international website that provides the same experience for every new potential market?
Start your journey at Test My Site to see how your website scores for desktop speed and mobile speed and optimization. Then learn how you can improve these aspects. Alternatively, if your site is still in its planning stage or there are other areas of your current design that you want to consider in a global context, check out our to-do list for accessing the global marketplace.
Take your website to the global market
- Treat all people equally
Consider your company as an international business with local clients, instead of seeing it as a local company with international clients. In addition, it offers the same treatment for all customers in the different markets. Make sure that the design, functionality and content of your websites provide the same user experience, regardless of where your customers are.
- A universal website or individual localized sites?
A universal multilingual website offers content in more than one language (eg, a Canadian company with versions of its site in English and French, or a blog about Latin American football in Spanish and Portuguese). A multilingual universal site that uses a single domain, such as .com, has several advantages:
Indicate that your company is international.
It is registered in a faster, simpler and cheaper way.
It allows users to find it more intuitively.
- However, you still have to meet the needs of your target market in each localized market.
Individual, localized and multi-regional websites explicitly target users from different countries. Each multi-regional website uses a country-coded top-level domain name (ccTLD), eg. eg, .ie, .de or .fr:
It allows you to emphasize the closeness to your customers in each country and is a comforting indicator for those users who want to buy products or services in their own language and use payment methods that are familiar to them.
However, buying and registering a ccTLD for each export market can be time-consuming and costly.
Some sites are multiregional and multilingual. For example, a site might have different versions for the US and Canada and, in turn, English and French versions for Canadian content.
- Choose your domain name
The top-level domain is the suffix (eg, .com, .org, .net). Many e-commerce sites choose .com because it is the option that users first use when searching for a business without a search engine. Although Google uses the content to determine the language of the site, the URL gives your users important clues about the content. For example, the following URLs use .fr as a subdomain or subdirectory to clearly indicate that the content is in French:
(http://example.ca/fr/vélo-de-montagne.html)
(http://fr.example.ca/vélo-de-montagne.html)
Including a language indicator in the URL can also help you spot problems with multilingual content on your site. One possibility is to translate the words in the URL, although you can also use an internationalized domain name (IDN).
Geographic redirection
If you successfully implement your international SEO, Google Search users will reach the correct language version of your site. If you visit Google.com, for example, the system automatically redirects you to the Google Search page specific to your country. However, imagine that a user who comes from an IP address in Spain is looking for content in English. Forced redirection to the Spanish section could reduce that user's engagement. So what are your options?
Disabling geographic redirection gives the user the option to stay on the site in English to which they arrive, regardless of whether their IP is from Spain.
Disabling the geographic redirection until the time of payment gives the user the possibility to choose their own route until they reach the confirmation of the purchase. Only then, the system redirects you to the site with the language corresponding to the country.
With automatic geographic redirection, the user is automatically redirected to the page where the content is in Spanish.
Pop-ups with a geo-redirect banner, such as "Do you want to visit our site in Spanish or stay in the English version?" Give the user a choice.
Loading speeds
Do not assume that all users have access to 4G networks, since 3G or slower networks are still used in much of the world. So when designing your site, make sure it loads quickly so that people don't give up before entering. Here are some suggestions on how to improve your loading speed:
Using eye-catching multimedia content is an effective way to attract users. However, an excessive amount of this type of content can slow the loading speed of your site and cause users to leave before seeing the most important information you have for them. So, compress all the images you use.
Limit the number of navigation links.
Avoid using pop-up windows or any other type of functions that may interfere with navigation.
Location
A localized website presents the same content as the main website, but translated into the language of your exporting country in a culturally appropriate way. (When it is not possible to create a direct translation, as in the case of a colloquial expression in your language, transcreation is used, which allows to communicate the same meaning and style to elicit the same response in the target language). We recommend doing the following for each new market:
- Use the same language your customers speak.
- Create a localized version of the website.
- Strengthen your brand development.
- Maximize your ability to appear in searches.
- Take into account the currencies and forms of payment.
- Meet the needs of your customers.
- Meets all legal requirements.
- Pay attention to every detail.
Design development
Unicode is the industry standard and is designed to promote and facilitate consistent rendering of text, regardless of the alphabet you use. Any written language has its own design needs, whether we speak Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, Arabic or Hebrew and regardless of whether it is read from left to right or vice versa. Unicode supports more than 100 alphabets and has a repertoire of more than one hundred thousand characters. The UTF-8 system is the most widely used.
Recommendations for the websites of any market
- Locate important information at the top of the page
Make sure important information is visible without having to scroll.
- Consider small screens
Throughout the day, your customers use small screens on their cell phones and tablets. Create a website that automatically adjusts to different user devices to ensure that they can find what they are looking for, regardless of the size of their screens.
- How to write the text:
Use clear and attractive titles
Using a clear title in the presentation of your site helps customers to quickly notice that they are in the right place and also motivates them to stay longer.
- Communicate your message with colors
Colors are also a form of language. Therefore, research your potential market's relationship to colors before launching your site in a new market. The meaning of the colors may vary from country to country. For example, in Western countries, white is used for weddings, while, in China, it is used at funerals. Red is a highly prestigious color in India, while in the UK the most prestigious color is purple and in China yellow.
- Present the benefits clearly
Make sure users immediately understand why they should stay on your site. To do this, make sure that the benefits of your products or services can be detected quickly. An excellent tool for communicating this is bulleted lists.
- Provides quick links for more information
For example, a prominent link with the text "More information" can motivate users to explore more content and stay on your website longer.
- Provides a clear call to action
If your site is clear about the action expected of users, visitors are much more likely to take that action and generate the business you are looking for.
- Build relationships with customers
- Allow people to easily communicate with your company to build trust.
- If you request personal information from customers, clearly state why you are doing it and what you will do with that data.
- Include customer testimonials or third party verifications.
- If you run ads, be sure to differentiate these posts and sponsored links from the rest of the content on your site.
