Why integrate multilingualism into your site?
Making your e-commerce site multilingual is a must for companies wishing to reach international customers. You'll be making your products available to new markets.
In the short term, the investment may seem rather onerous, both financially and in terms of the time required to get your site up and running. However, in the medium and long term, access to foreign markets is synonymous with diversification and expansion.
Multilingualism is generally an option available with all the most popular CMS (Content Management Systems) on the market. This is the case for WordPress, Shopify and PrestaShop.
3 questions to ask yourself before taking the plunge into multilingualism
What's the objective?
Making your site multilingual is part of an international expansion strategy. The aim here is to break geographical boundaries and access new market shares, without having to move or create new premises in your target country. Nevertheless, you'll need to take into account the various logistical arrangements involved, so that your products can be delivered to your customers on the spot.
What languages can you use on your site?
When choosing the language to integrate into your site, you'll need to think about your core target market. If your site is aimed primarily at French customers, you might consider adapting it for the French-speaking markets of North Africa and Quebec. Add English and Spanish to reach a large majority of the European and American markets. If you want to reach the Asian market, you'll need to integrate Mandarin. So it all depends on which language is spoken most in your target country.
What to translate?
It's important to define what to translate on your site. For the comfort of your visitors and, above all, for better conversion, you need to translate all the content you want to keep for these foreign markets. You may even need to create new content to adapt to the specificities of these markets. Changing the language of the most important paragraphs and descriptions won't be enough. Likewise, don't forget to translate image descriptions, links and other meta tags for SEO purposes into the target language.
A poorly translated site is unlikely to inspire confidence, because it won't look professional and, above all, won't meet customer requirements.
If the task seems daunting, don't hesitate to focus on flagship products or product ranges or those particularly suited to your target markets. Lowering your targets to focus on quality will enable you to test your performance in these new markets, and invest more confidently to establish a lasting presence.
Translation, a key stage
Different integration methods exist. Some offer advantages that others do not.
Enabling additional languages on CMS
In the administration settings for the various platforms, you can activate certain pre-translated languages. This will automatically translate certain recurring and standard elements on your website (e.g. "shopping carts", "accounts", "addresses", etc.).
New language = new content integration essential
There is no miracle solution for instant translation of all your content. While some modules offer to translate your site's content, these translations are automatic and poorly adapted to the language of the web, the language of your company, the language of your products and your added value.
Furthermore, these automatic translations will not adapt display to your translated content. The size of paragraphs, buttons, titles... these elements will probably require a new integration. for visual adaptation. To work as quickly as possible and for translation into multiple languages, text extractions for translation and mass integration can be set up.
How do newly translated sites fare in terms of SEO?
When you change the language of your online store, you're going to have to rethink your entire SEO strategy. That's because.., Each country has its own specific SEO requirements, not least because of the subtleties of the language. Similarly, while in France, much of Europe and the USA, Google remains the most widely used search engine, this is not the case in other countries such as China and Russia. So you'll need adapt your translations and SEO strategy to the workings of search engines such as Baidu for China or Yandex for Russia. Finally, don't hesitate to enlist the help of professionals in the SEO and SEA fields to better position yourself in the face of local competition.
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