4 Benefits of Website Localization for Businesses

Websites are no longer simple calling cards for businesses; today, they are lead revenue generators and order fulfillment devices in many industries. In fact, websites generate more customer traffic than physical businesses in today's society.

This means that consumer response to content and products on websites is critical to understanding a product’s popularity among a business’s clientele. In turn, this information makes it easier for businesses to scale and adapt their products to increase company revenue.

The growing ease of increasing company revenue through their websites is one of the main factors pushing businesses toward realizing the benefits of website localization.  Successful website localization is vital to ensuring you have a lucrative product expansion across various markets. Most consumers gauge a company’s credibility by its website.

Having a solid implementation strategy for your website’s localization is the best way to increase your brand’s consumer base in new markets and reap the benefits of localizing your content.  

Four Major Benefits of Website Localization

Expanded Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Across Markets

SEO increases visitor traffic from preferred markets by analyzing search engine algorithms and raising a website’s ranking on search engine results pages. A strong localization strategy safeguards your SEO terms by mapping your content’s chosen keywords and creating a glossary to house them so that a linguist can incorporate them into translated text and protect their meaning across various cultural barriers. This allows your website’s ranking to increase across multiple markets and expand traffic while maintaining your website’s integrity.

Increased Revenue Generation

With each new market comes the potential for a new revenue stream. A successful SEO strategy increases the number of consumers visiting your website and high-quality localization increases your product’s perceived value in each market, making customers more likely to choose your product over competitors. Localizing your website ultimately allows you to operate in a new market without the overhead costs of staffing, physical locations like storefronts and warehouses, and potential legal fees, among others. This streamlining allows for quicker product expansion across the market with little effort to maximize your company’s revenue.  

Easier Market Scalability

A good strategy allows you to scale into multi-language localization. It streamlines the process by allowing you to pick an initial target market and prioritize the content most important to those consumers. Some businesses test machine translation during this process to assess how much traffic their site gets and what content brings in the most views or buys and then design their content strategy around that research. Proxy services, another option, are less common due to downsides like inflexibility and expense. Scaling content localization is an effective and economical way to test your product on new markets across various languages.  

Increased Brand Integrity

Many consumers will meet your brand through your website, so reliable website localization keeps your brand consistent across markets. Make sure someone native to your market reviews your content before making it live. This will protect you from grammatical errors and other, more subtle, translation context errors. Certain words and phrases can vary wildly across cultures and languages, and adjusting your terminology to cultural norms will help you keep your brand consistent and increase consumer loyalty in different markets.

Reaping the Benefits of a Localization Platform

While manual localization may not seem like a hassle at first, the amount of content you have to translate and update will grow with your website. Localizing your content for just one language doubles the number of webpages you have to manage. That number increases exponentially with each additional language or market—even if you have a relatively small site.

So how do you minimize these growing pains and keep your site running smoothly? Invest in a robust framework for your site's architecture as well as an elite translation management platform. Investing in a robust framework for your site's architecture as well as an elite translation management platform is essential to economically and effectively localize your content.

Even if your website is small, you’ll still need to update it regularly. If you don’t design it properly for localization, you risk disrupting the integrity of the site in all other markets. You should also know which website technology works best for your site.

Most companies use static site generators to make sure they have robust architecture that can withstand localization—e.g., Jekyll, Hugo, Eleventy, etc.  Regardless, a good site framework allows your site to evolve. You should be able to grow without too much strain from continuous localization, and a structured translation management platform is key to that growth. Partnering with a localization service will empower you to map out and execute a successful localization plan.