How to invest in international markets.

Digital Marketing meets translation: how to invest in international markets.
Το μεταφραστικό κέντρο Glossima & Wehrheim.

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In the beginning…

In today’s digital age, the be-all and end-all of promoting a business locally is its “positioning” on the Internet and, in particular, on the most popular search engine (google). For its positioning, both figuratively and literally from a digital point of view, the first step is… the construction of a website.

In addition to the digital reality in which we now operate, it is well known that we are currently going through the most difficult period in terms of business reality in the last 50 years. The only logical way out is the constant search for channels and channels of communication with new markets, whether domestic or foreign. In this context, the widest and most effective promotion of a business is no longer a luxury but a necessity.

For the domestic market, things are relatively simple: the company plans and commissions the construction of a website to specially trained professionals who will present the company to the public through the image (web designers), the layout of information and the texts (copywriting) in order to attract as many “visitors” as possible in order to convince the latter of the products or services offered, that is, to become customers.

To achieve the above, from a technical point of view, the website builder will, among other things, encourage you to create a page based on specific specifications. He will talk to you about pages designed with SEO (Search Engine optimization/optimization of search engine results) parameters and, in particular, about meta-titles (titles), meta-descriptions (descriptions), tags, internal links, mobile friendly versions and other “Chinese” for most of us. In other words, he wants to tell you that there are ways that, when potential prospects/customers research a particular industry, type or service, your page will be positively evaluated by search engines and, ultimately, be “placed” in the top “showcase” positions.

But what happens when your target is foreign markets?

Once you have built a dynamic website that seems to work effectively for your promotion within a foreign market, the first step you need to take in order to be seen in a foreign market is to order professional translation of your website texts. Translation by specialized translators whose native language is the target language who “catch the pulse” of the audience and the rhythm of the market you are targeting by inserting local elements into the content of your website (website localization).

Then, depending on the target country, you will need to research the search engines through which your website will appear, i.e. where your business will be displayed. For example, if the country you are targeting is Russia, then your site will not “come up” on Google but on Yandex, if it is China, on Baidu, if it is South Korea, then Naver or Yahoo in Japan. Depending on which is the popular search engine in the target market, SEO techniques vary. Therefore, before investing a lot of money in advertising on these search engines, it is advisable to invest in SEO first.

So, once you have translated your texts, taking into account the linguistic and other peculiarities of the target audience, and after you have exhausted every possibility of promoting your website on the specific foreign search engine, you are theoretically ready for other marketing activities in this market.

But are you done here? Are you being given another essential help?

In addition to the technical elements for the promotion of your page (SEO) and the digital marketing techniques that will be suggested, such as for example adwords campaigns, etc., the ranking and performance of the page can also be improved by translation itself. This is a specialized translation service that takes SEO techniques into account.

The SEO translation is, therefore, the translation/writing of texts for a website in a foreign language using specific techniques so that your page is upgraded through the texts and appears on the first pages of searches. This is a combination of expertise that takes into account linguistic elements on the one hand and elements related to techniques for increasing the visibility of your site on the Internet on the other (statistics, algorithms, etc. are used which ultimately show us which are the most appropriate words or keywords to include in the texts, the appropriate number of words per section, the number of characters for titles, etc.).