How does a business broaden its online presence in foreign lands? Well, you’ll need a foreign language website in the target market for starters.

You must identify the best market to target through research, and see where there is a gap for you to exploit. If there are other similar businesses operating in a specific country, that’s a good sign as it demonstrates a demand for your service.

The next stage is to buy a locally hosted domain name in the target country, for example ‘.fr’ in France or ‘.de’ in Germany. This lays the foundation for you to translate your website into the desired language. However, from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective, you shouldn’t translate the keywords. And here’s why.

The correct dictionary translation of a keyword or phrase may NOT be what people use to search for the service locally; they may use colloquialisms or a different word that means the same thing. So in the same way as you identify your industry’s highest ranking keywords for the US or UK market, such as via Google’s free keyword finder, you must research the keywords for each country, to ensure your foreign language website is properly optimized.

These keywords should then be incorporated into a professionally translated website. It’s important that native speakers are used to translate your website as it must exude professionalism in all your target markets.

Even if your linguistic skills are pretty good, it’s important not to be a ‘have-a-go hero’. Just because you can get by perfectly well on the telephone with your Swiss supplier doesn’t qualify you as a translator – so best not to try it.

Supposing your written French, German or Spanish is perfectly comprehensible to native speakers, it probably won’t sound quite right to mother tongue speakers. Imagine if you find a poorly translated English-language website for a service you’re looking for…it may raise a smile in the office, but it probably won’t be added to your bookmarks.

To help the SEO process along, you can also use pay-per-click (PPC) and Google AdWords, which allows you to test out online marketing techniques for very little money – you can set your monthly budget at a nominal amount (as little as $5 if you like…) and gauge its efficacy without blowing your entire marketing budget.

And there you have it. With nothing more than a networked computer and some entrepreneurial savvy you can go global without breaking the bank.

About the author
Christian Arno is founder and Managing Director of Global translation company Lingo24, which has over a hundred members of staff working across four continents. With clients in over sixty countries, their turnover in 2009 was $6m USD.

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