Tuesday 28 August 2012

Use Your Website To Grow Your Business Overseas



The internet provides a big opportunity for businesses of all sizes. About one third of the world population has internet access and can be reached easily. So, if you have an existing website promoting or selling your products, you can tap into to this huge global market.

You may want to ask why trading overseas? Statistics from the UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) show that companies trading globally improve their productivity by 34%. They are also 12% more likely to survive than those who don't export. The UKTI statistics also show that businesses believe that exporting leads to innovation.

The main point to consider is which country and language to start with? Only 27% of the internet users speak English, and 85% of online customers prefer to make purchases in their own languages. Therefore, in order to attract these non-English speaking users for your products, you need to communicate with them in their respective languages.

How do we market our products to other countries we don’t know? Contrary to the common belief, the initial market research can be done on a small budget.

It would make sense to target one of the fastest growing top 9 languages used on the internet. These languages cover over 55% of the entire internet users’ population. In order of growth rate, these languages include Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Korean and Japanese.

Then how do you find out if there is a requirement for your products in countries where these languages are spoken?

The first method is using your Google Analytics data. This is a free product and will give you plenty of information. Here you can see your visitors’ languages and countries of residence. If you find any users data from any country other than the UK, then this could mean that your product or service has already attracted online users there. This can be a great starting point.

If you have no available data, then you may use the criteria below to decide which country may be suitable for your business:
   
- The number of internet users
- Their growth rate in the home market
- Openness to new products
- Number of existing products similar to yours

Then what about the market research without spending a fortune?

Start translating your keywords for your services or products. Then setup a small Google AdWords campaign to test the target country and monitor the traffic it generates thereafter to see if it’s worth pursuing further.

You can do all of these by yourself or choose an accredited translation company experienced in multilingual SEO to manage it for you, such as TTC Language Services.

Next month’s article: 7 Reasons why you should grow your business overseas

if you are interested in finding out more about multilingual SEO or considering business overseas contact Levent for free, no-obligation consultation by calling +44 (0)1245 216933 or email levent@wetranslate.co.uk.

Follow Levent on Twitter @yildizgoren

3 comments:

Alex Holliman said...

Nice article Levent.

I'd also suggest using the Google Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool

Again this is a free tool from Google and this will help you understand what people are searching for locally - so you can search for any phrase that you think people would use for your product or service and see how many search for that in pretty much any marketplace worldwide...

Unknown said...

Thank you for your feedback Alex and suggesting to use Google Keyword tool. Business owners can make use of these free tools to start planning to go global as well as for their UK marketing.

Multilingual SEO said...

Before 2 years I was doing Domestic business in our Country.when i talk about Growth International level.i contact SEO Optimizer said to me If you start MSEO can Get Business From Out of country..