How to Plan Your Website Localisation & How to Localise a Website?

India, our motherland, is a linguistically diversified country with more than 22 officially recognised languages and over 2,000 other dialects and languages. Over the last decade, there has been a sudden uptake in digital adoption. With the current pandemic, India alone witnessed an increase of 47 million Internet users from 2020 to 2021, making a total of 624 million Internet users as of last year. With the rise in the Indian language user base online, organisations are progressively moving towards a localised digital-first approach, focusing on improving customer experience. Serving customers in their language being the need of the hour, website localisation has taken the stage front and center.

Website Language Localisation – What Is It & How Can It Help Enhance Your Online Customer Experience?

Website localisation is where you modify your website content to meet the requirements of your target audience in a language and intent that suits their cultural norms. Website localisation and translation make your website more appealing and enhance your online customer experience. However, website language localisation is not to be confused with website translation. Website language localisation refers to revamping every aspect of it according to your target markets, from payment processes that fit local customer preferences to visuals that accurately depict the regional market.

Localisation can include all digital platforms such as websites, mobiles apps, etc., and possesses a massive potential to increase your website search traffic by using the right website localisation software. For instance, in his latest insights,  Patel has leveraged content localisation to increase search traffic by 42% in 3 weeks.

To help you better understand website language localisation, we will walk you through six steps to consider while planning your website localisation.

Six Steps to Consider While Planning to Localise Your Website

Step #1 When is the right time to localise your website?

Traditionally, organisations first design websites with only one language and think about adding more translations on completion of development. Localisation as an afterthought can result in increased costs and, in fact, slows down your go-to-market strategy in the long run. With time, as the number of your website pages increases, the chance of introducing website content translation errors also increases. This can be prevented by localising your website in the earlier design and development stages rather than waiting for the last moment.

Step #2 How to build your localisation strategy?

While planning a website localisation strategy, you’ll need to:

• Understand your target audience and categorise them based on their preferred languages, cultural norms, purchasing power, and the region they reside in.
• Make sure your brand’s tone and voice resonate with your targeted regional audience while getting your website translated.
• Create a localisation process workflow that works best for your localisation partner. Depending on the size and scale of your website, the amount of work and duration may vary. Ideally, your localisation partner would have multiple stakeholders such as translators, project managers, and marketers, among others.
• Set KPIs to measure the outcomes of your website localisation strategy.

Step #3 How to choose the right website localisation partner? 

Onboarding the right website localisation solution partner is critical for making your brand’s localisation journey a success. Here are the five pointers you should keep note of while finalising your website localisation solution provider:

• A localisation partner should provide you with the best quality translated content with a quick turn-around-time. Considering Indian language translations, certain standards are met only by a few localisation partners, especially when it comes to the standardisation of Indic scripts, and spellings based on pronunciations.
• Unlike on-demand Indian language plug-ins, your localisation partner must ensure SEO compatibility for localised webpages, making them easily discoverable by your target audience.
• It should be cost-effective and enable you to optimise your in-house marketing resources.
• It should seamlessly integrate with your website, requiring zero coding effort and minimal to zero IT dependency.
• As your content scales up across multiple languages, your localisation partner should be able to scale with you.

As a single source of truth for all your localisation needs, Reverie’s Anuvadak does all this and more. It helps localise the entire user journey. The platform works efficiently across dynamic websites such as eCommerce, banking, fintech, government, healthcare, gaming, automotive, among others. Anuvadak can scale down your website localisation time by 40% and save as much as 60% of the localisation and content management costs as an automated website localisation software platform.

If you haven’t tried Reverie’s website localisation solution – Anuvadak, you should request a demo now! 

Step #4 How to analyse and build user-friendly Indian language websites?

Website localisation process and translation ROI depends significantly on how well the local people accept your localised message with the same wit and wisdom that your original message exhibits. You should ensure that your website is intuitive, easy to use and possesses a localised conversational tone that prevents your target audience from abandoning the page when they encounter untranslated content. Specialised website localisation software such as Anuvadak can help you do the trick. 

Step #5 How to localise your SEO strategy to rank higher?

Once you’ve identified your target audience and your local market, the next step is coupling your website translation with a robust multilingual SEO strategy. Multilingual SEO is meant to target regional customers explicitly and localises your content to meet the SEO requirements that attract your native customers. 

For instance, the eCommerce industry uses terms such as checkout, wishlist, cart, etc. These words have different SEO values and versions when translated to other languages. With a rise in demand for websites & mobile apps in indigenous languages, it is crucial to evolve from an International SEO strategy to an Indian SEO strategy that includes the right keywords.

Step #6 How to track your website localisation quality and strategy? 

Once your organisation begins its localisation journey, it is essential to measure the right set of KPIs and iterate your localisation effort accordingly. Here you would need assistance from an expert team to enhance localisation using website localisation software. Tracking your localisation strategy and quality would include targeting multiple regional markets, tracking, and optimising for the right outcomes such as translation cost, target audience size, page views, conversion rate, customer support cases, and so on. This will help your brand ensure its localisation quality, usability, and market-friendliness.

According to a recent Google report on Indian Internet users, 90% of Internet users prefer to use their local language to search and carry out tasks online. We continue to see staggering data that proves the same.

If you are looking to tap into this pool of India’s market and gain and retain your customer’s loyalty, executing website localisation would be an arrow shot in the right direction.

Need expert advice on website language localisation? Drop us a note here.