How a Multilingual Website can Help Grow your Business

Businesses grow by widening their reach to a bigger customer base. Being a global presence plays a huge role in it. But is it easy to achieve? What’s the most challenging part of marking your global presence?

Of course, language and cultural variables (a major element in website design) make it hard for businesses to go global. When there is diversity in language, culture, etc., it can be hard to satisfy all. But you can reduce it to a great extent by making your business website multilingual.

This way you can represent different countries and languages through your website thus making them part of your business. This article delves into how going multilingual helps your business and guides you on converting your website to a multilingual one.

Following are some of the major advantages of turning your website multilingual.

Reach a Wider Audience

The more languages your website is available in, the wider your audience becomes. Going multilingual is one of the best ways to create a wider audience for your website or business.

Spanish is found to be the second most spoken language in the U.S.A. This points at how having a multilingual website helps you reach more people in the domestic market in addition to the international market.

Improve Search Engine Ranking

Search engine ranking is a key player in bringing traffic and conversions to your website. By optimizing your website with language-specific keywords you will be able to easily reach your potential customers.

The majority of all search engines are multi-lingual and language-specific search engines also exist like Baidu for Chinese, Biglobe for Japanese, Fireball for German, etc. To reach people who use their native language for searches, you need to have content in their language. You can only achieve it by going multilingual.

Keep a Steady Bounce Rate and Increase Conversions

Bounce rate has a direct correlation with conversions and sales. If your website visitors are not staying on your website long enough to convert or staying a long period without converting, it points to a particular issue with your website which mostly has to do with its user experience.

For example, when a non-English speaker visits your website and are unable to find content in their language, chances are they will find it hard to navigate the website and fail to find the product or information they are looking for. Here even though the bounce rate is lower it will have no positive impact on your business.

On the other hand, some visitors might quickly leave your website (most probably towards your better competitors), unable to find your website in their language thus leading to a higher bounce rate. Thus bounce rate would be a good indicator of whether your website needs further improvement on its multi-language ability.

Competitive Advantage

If you are running an international business you will be facing a lot of competition. Having a multilingual website gives you an opportunity to target different demographics your competitors haven’t shown their presence yet.

This way you will be able to easily communicate with non-English speakers and let them learn about the products and services you offer.

Build Trust and Brand Reputation

Trust and brand reputation are two of the most important factors that lead to increased customer retention and sales. There could be multiple brands selling the same product, but customers will reach out to the one that speaks in their language. For an international business, going multilingual is the best way to find a place in the heart of its customers.

That being said, mere translation of words wouldn’t be enough, you will have to do research on their culture and find its nuances to provide them with a great user experience on your website.

Bring in New Customers

While your brand image and trust help you sustain your existing customers you can add new customers by expanding your business to different geographies speaking different languages. If you detect that your products or services have a higher demand in a specific region, you can take steps to optimize your website for the people in the area by making your website available in their language or using other similar tactics.

As per a case study conducted by WPML– a solution that helps convert WordPress based websites to multilingual – you will learn about the importance of having a multilingual website.

• 92% of their traffic comes from outside of the US.
• Among them, 55% are not native English speakers.
• Out of the top 10 most popular browser languages of their users, only less than half were English.
• When support was provided in native languages communication became easy, tickets were solved quickly and customers were found happier. If you are offering support for consumer products, you can expect an even higher demand for local support.

By now, you probably would have realized the importance of turning your website multilingual. Now the next step is to find the right tool that will help you with it. If you are running a WordPress website, WPML would be a great tool to achieve it.

WPML is a WordPress plugin that has been around since 2009. Now it helps over half a million commercial WordPress sites- including ours- to be multilingual within an affordable budget.

If your goal is to be a key player in the international market, you can’t do it without going multilingual. Being a small business or having a low budget will not stop you from it if you have the right help you need. Hopefully, the article helped you become aware of the benefits of going multilingual and how to achieve it.