Five reasons to translate your blogs now

Blogs can be one of the most influential online resource in shaping consumer opinion.

Today’s internet visitors are much more selective when it comes to the kind of content they choose to consume online. We are bombarded everyday with a near-overwhelming amount of information, all fighting to capture our limited attention span. To gain a competitive advantage in your online marketing, finding and employing new content strategies is thus more important than ever to ensure that your business stands out.

One strategy is to populate the web with a variety of regular content, such as press releases, case studies, blogs, white papers, and social media posts so as to continually engage an audience and potential customers. Of these different types of content, blogs are increasingly becoming one of the most effective channel for businesses to get their messages out to customers. In some ways, blogs are even more influential than Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other social networks.

Nearly every Fortune 500 company today puts out blogs on a regular basis. These blogs cover everything from their services and solutions, industry trends and topics of interests to their customers. Unfortunately, many of these said companies fail to realize the importance of translating these blogs to reproduce the same impact in all languages of their business. Despite pouring huge amounts of money and effort into developing original blogs in English, companies waste innumerable international marketing opportunities by neglecting to translate their digital content. After all, blog translation can help websites gain as much as 100% in organic search traffic depending on how many target languages a company chooses to translate its blogs.

Not convinced that translating your blogs is worth the additional investment? Read on for five more reasons for why translating your online content is a good idea.

1)  Gain search traffic globally.

Although English is one of the most popular languages in the world, it actually only accounts for 25% of all internet traffic, and that number is decreasing! Languages like Chinese, Spanish, Arabic Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and other languages account for the significant majority share of Internet language use. This means that if your company is only posting blogs in English, you are missing out on a substantial chunk of the Internet traffic, leading to lost sales opportunities.

Translation also optimizes the search algorithms behind the world’s biggest search engines like Google. Each time a new blog is posted, it becomes one more indexed page on your website to show up in search engine results, driving traffic to your website. Therefore, translation can increase your chances of being seen by an online user by several fold. Each blog is indexed by Google and other search engines, meaning you can easily multiply your search engine exposures (SEO) by the number of languages you translate into, substantially increasing your organic search traffic on a global scale.

Translated blogs also help businesses gain visibility on alternative social media platforms popular in different countries, such as China’s Wechat, Russia’s VKontakte, and Mixi in Japan. When a company puts out an original blog in English, that content is shared on social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest; translated blogs have the same social media multiplier effect with international social media platforms.

Incidentally, search engine rankings are determined by combined traffic worldwide. By increasing your SEO in other languages, you improve your global rankings and stand to generate substantially more sales opportunities as more people will be directed to your products and services online.

2)  Blogs are more trustworthy.

Unlike press releases, case studies, white papers and other professional content a company puts out online, blogs are usually considered more genuine and thus more trustworthy. Recent marketing research found that blogs outrank many other content types including even social networks for consumer influence. In fact, blogs are now the third most influential digital resource in shaping consumer opinion when making overall purchases, behind retail and brand sites.

Blogs written by normal users (rather than companies or PR companies) engage readers more easily because they feel less like propaganda. Furthermore, most blogs allow readers to add their own comments and discussions which adds a further element of openness and fairness. The democratic nature explains why we trust blogs and other user-generated content more than a company sponsored or professional content.

Blog content also tends to be more up-to-date. Compared to other static pages on a typical company’s website, blogs get created and updated all the time, making them more appealing to readers who are interested in finding the latest information about a particular topic, product, or service.

The popularity of blogs is something that search algorithms love too which explains why good blogs often show up on the top of Google search results.

By translating your blogs, you are able to leverage the original content for multiple placements. Blog translation is not considered as duplicated content by search engines. Thus, translate your blogs each time you publish a news blog to build consumer trust among your target audience across languages.

3)  Enhance your international online reputation.

News and media is produced and disseminated through ever more scattered, decentralized, and dynamic information sharing networks and publishing platforms. As a result, managing a good corporate reputation is becoming more and more challenging. However, in today’s digital economy, online reputation management is ever more essential for any business.

Although some businesses have begun to actively manage their online reputation, many of them overlook the fact that their online reputation does not solely exist in English. Simply because a company’s search results and social media exposures are good in English does not guarantee they are equally pristine in other languages. In reality, search engine results can differ significantly across languages because they draw on the available content in a particular country or region. By translating their blogs, smart businesses are able to own their SERP (search engine result page) in all languages in which they do business. Search engine algorithms value blogs higher when generating SERPs. You can read more about the technicalities of online reputation management (ORM) here.

News, blog posts, social media discussions, and the availability of other online content available across languages all help to create a strong impact on a company’s brand globally.

4)  Translating blogs is easier than you think.

After spending so much time developing your original blog content in English, it would be a waste to not capture the full value of your content. Translation of your blogs into all major languages is perhaps the easiest and most direct way to maximize your return on investment (ROI) in producing good content.

Although machine translation (MT) like Google Translate can get your blogs translated instantly and for free, machine translation is not accurate enough to be used in customer facing content. In some cases, using machine translation can also subject your brand to legal issues when customers misuse your products because of unclear or inaccurately translated text. Additionally, poorly translated blogs with obvious grammar errors will result in a search engine penalty, tarnishing your global reputation.

To make high quality translation more accessible, a number of new technology startups are combining the power of machine tools with human translators to produce quality translation with greater speed and affordability. For example, Stepes recently introduced a mobile translation technology that allows subject matter experts around the world to translate when and where they want using their smartphones and earn money. The idea is that linguistic quality can be improved by employing people who are knowledgeable about the subject matter field to do the translation themselves. Stepes’s big translation approach is able to harness the collective knowledge of these experts to help translate highly technical content for improved linguistic accuracy and readability.

New and accessible translation tools mean that translation is now within reach for even the smallest of businesses. Don’t leave your blog translation as a second thought anymore. Get your blogs translated today.

5)  Establish your brand as the key opinion leader (KOL) in your field.

Blogs are a great way to promote your business as the authority on a particular subject. The best business blogs offer information on trending industry topics and novel insights that are truly valuable to readers. Studies find that people are more likely to purchase from businesses that they view as an industry leader, all else being equal. Being able to appear more legitimate or high quality to customers through your blog content can give you the extra edge among your competition.

However, just as Web traffic is largely conducted in languages outside of English, your status as the key opinion leader (KOL) matters in all other languages in which your company conducts its business. Consistently translating your blogs into other languages will help establish you as a global authority, allowing you to more effectively target your international customers.

Try translating a few of your blogs today, and see for yourself the difference it can make for your bottom line.