How to design and optimise your website across cultural divides.
This is a guest post by Christian Arno (see author info below)
Designing a website for a particular cultural group means taking into consideration a whole host of issues – not only do you have the specificities of language to consider, there’s also the issue of culturally sensitive content and tone and specific cultural preferences when it comes to design, colour schemes, navigation systems and branding (will your audience prefer a site that’s minimalist and straight-to-the-point, or one with lots of colour, animation, and multimedia?). Then there’s the question of how to effectively promote your site in your target market’s search engine of choice. This last issue is where dedicated research into your targeted cultural group’s preference in search engines and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) terms will come in handy.
For those not familiar with the use of SEO terms, here’s a quick rundown on how it works. When a web user wants to find something online, they type into a search engine a term or phrase that’s related to what they’re looking for, for instance, ‘home insurance’. The search engine then combs through the web looking for sites using this term in headings, sub headings and at the beginning of pages and paragraphs. By knowing exactly what terms your niche market is likely to use when looking for what your site is offering, and then using those terms prominently in your headings and opening sentences, you’re more likely to pop up on the top of the search engine’s page rankings.
Of course, there’s also the cheekier side to SEO terms, wherein you can use search terms that are popular in your target market – but entirely unrelated to your product – to sneak up the page rankings. For instance, a popular search term in the USA right now is Oscars – the Academy Awards ceremony is obviously weighing heavily on people’s minds. Handily, this can help you to sell, say, home insurance, by mentioning the term Oscars in your page’s title or opening sentence – for example, ‘Red carpet glamour isn’t just for celebrities on Oscars night – with our customer focused insurance policies you’ll feel like a superstar every day.’
Naturally, SEO terms are ever-changing and, crucially, are unique to each different country and niche market. This is where it comes in handy to have an SEO copywriter and a dedicated translator working into their native tongue – simply doing a direct dictionary translation of your top ranking search terms will not always work, as it doesn’t take into account the local colloquialisms. If you want to sell suit jackets to the French, would you use the search term ‘Veste de Costume’, the literal translation of ‘suit jacket’? You might, but it wouldn’t get you terribly far, as your French customers are far more likely to be searching for ‘Le Smoking’ when they’re in the market for a new blazer.
It’s also important to identify which is the most popular search engine for your target market. Say you want to focus on Russia, then your best bet would be to focus on climbing the page rankings at Yandex – it’s long been the number one search engine in Russia, and is in fact the fastest growing search engine in the world. That wouldn’t be your only issue in targeting a Russian audience, however – you’d need to take into account the complexities of the Russian language and Cyrillic alphabet. Russian is an inflected language, meaning there are no words for ‘the’ or ‘a’ and no verb for ‘to be’ – rather, the ending of the word changes depending on its context in the sentence. You can imagine the complexity of the variations in relevant search terms – this is where your dedicated Russian-language translator comes into play once again.
Google may be so omnipresent in the West that its name has become a byword for the very act of conducting an internet search (Google is now a verb!), but it’s not the only player in the game. In the United States, for instance, Yahoo may only hold 14% of the search market compared to Google’s 71%, but that’s still a significant amount of web users, and search engines Bing and Ask aren’t far behind.
Similarly, if you’re targeting the Chinese market then you’ll need to figure out how to climb the rankings at Baidu, the top Chinese language search engine, currently positioned as the eighth most popular search engine in the world by Alexa web rank. Bear in mind, when designing an SEO campaign for Baidu that the search engine censors content in line with Chinese government regulations – having a Chinese language translator would be invaluable in ensuring you avoid any pesky banned search terms.
Every product has its niche market, and if you can figure out who those customers are, where they are situated, how best to market to them and how they’re likely to go about searching for your product online, then your potential for market dominance will shoot through the roof.
About the author
Christian Arno is founder and Managing Director of Lingo24, a global translation services provider that specialises in website localisation.
Photo source: ilco (via sxc.hu)
Its a bit difficult to believe in this topic