How To Optimize Your Website For a Global Audience

If you’re a company that sells products to other countries or a SaaS (Software as a Service) digital brand, there’s no limit to the opportunities available to you, especially if you can do business on a global scale.

We live in the age of technology when there are many ample opportunities for design and marketing experts to connect with clients all around the world, expanding their growth and sales.

While a global landscape has its benefits – including a massive earning potential – there are challenges that you must overcome if you want to succeed.

You’ll need to figure out how you will optimize your content to speak to people from different backgrounds, countries, and cultures. What works in one country might be considered inappropriate or rude in another. Knowing various cultural differences is an important part of doing business on a global level. 

What else do you need to consider when creating a website and a brand for a global audience.

Below are tips and strategies you need to implement when building a successful website for different countries.

1.  Get your Site Architecture Right

The first step in building an effective global website is figuring out how to organize your website. When setting up a website for different regions, you’ll need to choose how to set up your domain. There are a number of options to choose from:

●        Using separate domains. Such as: website.com
●        Using sub-domains. Such as: uk.website.com/
●        Using sub-directories. Such as website.com/uk/

Using a separate domain is the most common option, especially for large international companies that market to people in different regions and have the necessary resources to manage multiple websites. 

Subdomains provide a greater degree of granularity, assisting with targeting users via region and language without having to have a separate website. You can optimize sub-domain individually and target a different set of keywords and phrases in other languages to ensure users from other countries can find your content easily. You’ll need to build a separate search engine optimization strategy for each sub-domain to get better results.

Sub-directories are another way to organize your content for different global audiences. Sub-directories are simply the folders you can within a structure of your website that will have specific pages targeting individual regions. They can be done manually by creating separate folders or are generated automatically when you set up categories within your website

2.  Conduct Local Keyword Research

Keyword research has always been an essential part of optimizing any website. However, search queries in one part of the world won’t be the same as in another.

The tone of voice, language, and even interest can shift depending on where you’re targeting.

Don’t just use translated versions of the same keywords on your US website elsewhere in the world. You should start your keyword research strategy from scratch every time you launch a new domain or subdirectory.

Look for trending topics that people are talking about in each region. You can find plenty of helpful keyword tools online like Ahrefs or SEMRush that allow you to track ranking content according to the region you want to write for.

3.  Translate Content Correctly

Translation and localization are two very important factors to consider when you’re creating content that’s optimized for different parts of the world.

You shouldn’t just take posts from your English blog and copy/paste them into Google Translate for your French website. This type of translations will end up making your content sound disjointed and strange.

Anyone who speaks the language on your website fluently will be able to spot a poor translation, and this will end up making you seem unprofessional.

The best thing you can do is get help from someone who fluently speaks the language. You can find experts on sites like Lingo24 or Milengo, for instance.

Remember, you shouldn’t be mixing languages on the same blog. Instead, the focus should be on maintaining a strong local appearance on each version of your website, even if you’re producing something that’s “global”.

If you’re a small company that has no budget to hire a translator there are a number of plugins that will allow you to switch your website to another language easily. WordPress Translation Plugins Compared ) but this should be done only if you are unable to use other options. The translation done using these plugins will likely have numerous errors and inaccuracies so do this only as a last resort. 

4.  Create The Right Type of Content

Just as the keywords and language can change when you’re writing for blogs in different parts of the world, it’s also important to remember that the kinds of content you write about can differ too.

The topics that people will be interested in on your website will vary depending on who you’re writing for. Proper audience research will help you make more informed decisions about what sort of blogs you want to produce.

Look into the hot topics and sensitive issues that are trending in your industry in different parts of the world.

Try to create content that covers topics that people in other countries will find relevant to their needs. A story about winter activities in Australia will need to appear on your website at a very different time than it does for US users.

The more you know about your audiences the easier it will be to create content that targets their specific needs.

Consider making customer personas for every group of users you might want to reach with your global website.

5.  Make Your Website Fast

Speed is essential to running an effective and professional website. You’ll need to ensure that no matter which option you choose when setting up the website, all your web pages load fast.

Unlike users in most industrial countries, many people accessing the web in other parts of the world have much slower connections. This means the pages will load much slower for people who live in rural areas and other regions with slow internet. That is why it’s crucial to have a website that loads fast regardless of your internet speed.

To speed up your website you can do many things including getting rid of unnecessary plugins if you’re running WP, compressing your images using free image compressing software. You should also find hosting companies that have high ratings when it comes to performance. Another option is to use content delivery networks that help improve the performance by hosting your files on various global networks.

By using CDN you can access groups of cloud-based services from around the world to deliver content from the closest point to each visitor or customer.

Instead of having to load your website from the same server no matter where your customers might be, a multi-site solution will give you the freedom to deliver content from the right environment every time.

Conclusion

The internet has broken down the barriers between countries around the world. You don’t need to be located in a specific region to build a business there. Instead, you can connect with your audience wherever they are, from a distance using your website and many technology tools that are readily available.

However, just because the internet makes it easier to do business in other countries, doesn’t mean there aren’t any challenges to overcome. You’ll still need to build a website that’s optimized to deliver the best experience specific to your customers and target their individual needs.

Jen McKenzie is a writer at Assignyourwriter.co.uk and an up-and-coming author from NY. She writes on business, marketing, and HR subjects. When not at her desk, you can find her taking long strolls in the countryside or enjoying her free time brushing up on photo editing. You can reach Jennifer @jenmcknzie