The article explains certain best practices to make your website localization a success.

Expanding any business abroad is a major undertaking and often it happens that most businesses take a long time to touch a matured state in their approach to website localization. Often localization of a website is confused with translation. Website localization goes beyond translation and is a more specialized process of adapting web content and applications for regional (local) consumption. The process modifies the source language and other site elements, making it appeal to the customer’s preferences in their own local language. It is crucial for businesses to understand that website translation refers to the process of shifting an original language version of web content such as text, multimedia, e-books, or apps into a different language by simply substituting words from one language to another—in context. Experienced digital marketing agencies can help businesses with content localization.

Adapting localization strategies to the online content and deliverables for regional specificity help global brands to ensure a quality customer experience. Website localization is all about refining your message and curating your brand to meet the cultural, functional, and language expectations of your global markets.

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Here are a few tips for optimized website localization –

Consider Web Analytics –Along with selecting the right language set, make sure to align with your leadership, sales team, and to mine language insights of your global audience from web analytics data. Make sure to look at the geographic locations from where your visitors most frequently access your website, and also their browser language setting. These two data points can provide significant insights about the languages that your visitors use day-to-day.

Consider Basics –Pay attention to even basic details. Some of them such as punctuation formats, time and date, can have significant impact on how the user perceives. Make sure that your content matches the accepted standards of your target market. For instance, consider whether your target market uses names of months in alphabets or do they prefer numerals? Do they prefer 12-hour standard time format or 24-hour format? Displaying dates and times in the preferred local formats is also recommended as it avoids confusion and allows for an improved user experience.

Offer Diverse Currency & Payment Options –For online E-commerce website, it is really crucial to display prices in the local currency. When users arrive at your site, the last thing they will want to do is convert the prices into values that leads to further decisions. Users in different countries also have different payment preferences such as iDeal in the Netherlands, Alipay and Tenpay in China, while few prefer cash pay delivery.

Create a Style Guide –Creating a style guide will help throughout the localization of your website. Different languages require different fonts and styles.This framework will help the readers understand the written and visual presentation of a company’s content.

Use Advanced Coding and Software –Use Unicode to standardize your website structure. This universal character encoding standard is an ideal way to mix various scripts and languages in a document and exchange documents between people with different locales. . Also consider implementing a multilingual user interface, which helps to change to other languages.

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Use Global Design Templates –The need for global consistency will only strengthen, with more and more companies adding languages and local websites. It allows management of a lot of country sites by very few people. It also allows all content managers to use common tools and processes. The global template is easier to manage.For the end user, these templates provide a reliable interface that will help in usability and credibility.

Choose a Reliable Digital Marketing Agency –Make sure to benefit from the services a translator who knows the cultural differences between both the countries, that is your country and the one you’re marketing to. Reputable online marketing agencies provide services from expert translators who stay in or have lived in that country. Such native speakers can pin point the ideas that will work in your advertising campaign. They can assist you with the viewpoint of the local people.

With appropriate planning, an intensive localization strategy along with a skilled LSP partner can help you successfully execute your strategy.