If you want to expand your online business and target an international audience, the first step is to create a multilingual WordPress website. Translating your web pages will help you reach customers all over the world and improve your search engine rankings. All you need to get started is a plugin and good translations.
In this article, we present the advantages of a multilingual website and the solution that we recommend to all our customers to build a website for different audiences in a few steps.
The advantages of a WordPress site in multiple languages
If you are aiming to reach an international audience, a multilingual WordPress site is the most effective and cheapest solution to promote your message in various parts of the world. Creating content in multiple languages brings you numerous advantages. What are they? We can think of at least six:
1. Great results with a low budget
Creating web pages in different languages costs significantly less than an international marketing strategy. A multilingual WordPress site is the ideal starting point to take your business worldwide without the need for intermediaries or a distribution network for your products abroad.
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2. Improve your international positioning
In our blog, we have already seen how SEO (Search Engine Optimization) works and how it can improve traffic flows to your site. Creating text designed to please Google is one of the most effective actions to attract new audiences. By translating your WordPress site for positioning purposes, you’ll reach more people in different markets.
3. Increase traffic in no time
A multilingual WordPress site has an immediate effect: visits to your pages will grow within a few weeks. Translations will create more visibility for more keywords, and therefore your page becomes easier to reach.
4. Expand your target market
With Google Analytics connected to your site, you can analyze the countries of origin of your audience to adjust your strategy. If, for example, English searches are coming from Latin American countries, you might consider a Spanish translation.
5. Enhance your digital reputation
A multilingual WordPress site expands your brand’s awareness and allows you to become a point of reference in your industry. If let’s say, you produce wine in Northern Italy and conquer search engines for related keywords in Portuguese, you could become synonymous with Italian wine in Portugal and Brazil.
6. Increase your sales volume
Last but not least, a multilingual WordPress will help with the growth of overall sales: with a wider market you have a much larger potential clientele, and consequently a bigger volume of business at your disposal.
Creating a multilingual WordPress site with WPML
Our recommendation for creating content in multiple languages is using the WPML plugin, one of the most popular and well-known applications used for this on the web. The WPML plugin is easy to configure andcreates multilingual pages in a short time on a different web address than the original content. Let’s take an example of an English translation of an About Us page:
- The URL of the English page will be www.mysite.com/about;
- WPML creates a duplicate in Italian with the address www.ilmiosito.it/it/chisiamo/.
In this way, search engines will find the information they need in the different target pages, without confusing one language with the other. Not bad, right?
The only flaw of WPML, which might hold you back before installing it, is its cost. There isn’t a free version of the plugin and therefore, to download it, you’ll have to choose one of the paid plans offered. The prices range from $29 to $159, depending on the number of sites on which you intend to use it. The benefits it can bring to your business, however, go far beyond this small investment!
WPML is among the best plugins for multilingual sites on WordPress – it’s good value for money. On top of that, it offers first-class technical support and excellent compatibility with all the most commonly used themes and extensions.
If you only have one site to configure, you can get away with $29 for the installation and $21 for each year of renewal, which is a very acceptable amount.
What are the requirements for a good translation?
Let’s open the chapter on actual translation with a clear and precise piece of advice: never rely on machine translation systems.
The level of translation offered by services like Google Translate is not enough to create quality content. You need a professional service to produce texts that are effective for both your audience and search engines.
The best solution is to hire an experienced translator. For example, we recently worked with a copywriting agency on a website, which took care of the Italian and English text. We focussed on SEO; to create immediately effective product sheets. It is a higher a cost than using translation machines, but it often proves to be worth it.
A final recommendation: don’t forget to translate all parts of the site. It often happens that you focus on the pages – the “About Us” page, product descriptions, blog articles – and forget about the structural elements, such as header, footer, menus, contact forms, or checkout pages. A complete translation improves your visibility and user experience, so be careful not to leave anything behind.
Get help with your multilingual site from a team of experts
Creating multilingual WordPress sites brings many advantages to digital businesses: costs are reduced and potential earnings are unlimited. WPML is one of the most popular and effective tools for creating pages in multiple languages: it has a low annual price and excellent customer service.
Translations, however, have to be done right to be effective. Get in touch today to set up your multilingual WordPress site and have our team help you reach an international audience in no time.
