Assessing Website Localization Prospectiveness: 5 Steps
Miloš MatovićThis article features some of the tips that may help you choose the right course for your business expansion.
Going global or adapting your website to several local markets is one of the smartest things you could do, but it does not come without its risks. The prospective new markets must be chosen wisely before the website localization and multilingual SEO teams kick in with their magic. This article features some of the tips that may help you choose the right course for your business expansion.
1. Get Insight into the New Markets
You probably already have at least an idea on what your next foreign market will be. But is it really right for your product/service?
First, you should check the local market trends and the demand for your industry on the given local market by using the dedicated market research tools and resources. Next, you should check the data such as website hits from the desired location and keywords related to your business in the target languages.
This step includes data crunching, strategic and marketing decisions but also a little bit of intuition and for these reasons it is probably the most important one.
2. Analyze the Local Competition
Knowing where similar businesses stand on the local market and what makes your business different from the local competitors and detecting the comparable pros and cons of your company is always a valuable information that may help you get a more realistic expectations from a new market entry.
3. Set the Conversion Goals
Every industry is different, every business is different and every market is different, but taking the idiosyncrasies of your own company and the data collected above, you should get an estimated conversion value of your localized website.
The estimated conversion values and rates will help you set realistic conversion goals to be achieved on the local market.
4. Calculate Localization Costs
Once you get your data, you can decide on the localization scope, number of languages and calculate the localization costs of a new market entry.
5. Estimate the ROI
Return of investment is sometimes elusive and difficult to calculate, but with all the mentioned figures collected you may be able to make a pretty good ROI estimation that may help you make the final decision.