Website localisation and content marketing go hand in hand. And while you may need a professional translator or translation company to take on the heavy lifting, there are lots of things you can do to begin and support the process yourself. Our ABC of online marketing language will help you make sense of some of those helpful blog posts you’ve read where you have no idea what the expert is actually talking about. Translation is everything – even if it’s technically English!
Adwords: Paid, advertising search results on Google. These show up in yellow at the top and bottom of organic results.
Blog: A great way to share content, drive engagement, incorporate keywords and keep your site fresh.
Content: The ‘stuff’ online – photos, images, diagrams, written copy (text/artciles/survey results/reports) etc. Anything that provides information.
Digital: Signals or data expressed as series of digits 1 and 0. The foundation of digital technologies and how they run.
Ecommerce: Shopping online
Facebook: One of the best business to consumer social sharing platforms, use it wisely, don’t overuse it. Be helpful, not salesy – it’s a social space.
Google: The biggest of all the search engines, but still not the most used in every single country. In Russia, they would rather use Yandex.
Hire: People to strategise and manage your day to day or weekly online activities. Structure and consistency of purpose is vital!
Joomla: One of the most popular online content management systems – similar to WordPress or Ruby on Rails – a way to manage your website.
Keywords: The search terms people use in search engines, to find products or services you provide. The words that connect your consumer, to you.
Links: Provide links to useful sites and ask others to link to you to help more people find you and help to tell Google you’re a good resource.
Meta tags or Tags: Words or phrases that help let search engines know what your blog post is about.
Non English Speaking Markets: Don’t forget about them. Speak your customers language if you want them to find you online. Google can auto translate sites but it’s far from reliable and a dedicated country-specific presence, translated by professional translators will pay off in value for SEO and customer trust in your site and brand.
Organic: Results in Google that are there not as paid ads (i.e. Adwords, the yellow boxes) but based on organic reasons like great content, fresh, relevant and cited by a lot of other blogs and sites as relevant to the topic you’re searching.
PPC: Pay per click. Advertising space paid for per time a viewer clicks on the ad, taking the viewer to the advertiser’s site.
Quality over Quantity: Using keyword lots of times used to help ranking, now, it’s all about quality and variation, engagement and customer satisfaction – jut like real life!
Ranking: Where a site appears in Googles search results with 1 being the first result at the top of the page. Google always lists ten results per page and sometimes additionally includes Video, News or Image results – these are always addition to the ten regular results on a page.
Search Engine: A website or tool that someone uses to search for something online. Eg. Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. These sites do not contain their own content but index the sites and content provided by others.
Time your customers are online: Due to smartphones and tablets, it gets harder and harder to say when ‘peak’ times are. Different groups, ages etc. You have to try things out and get to know your customer!
URL: A web address, e.g. www.google.com
Voice: Keep the voice of your social and blog presence consisted with your brand and message.
Web 2.0: The age of the internet where it’s all about interaction, rather than merely reading a website. And then leaving. Web 2.0 involves, commenting, discussing, sharing etc.
eXercise: Practice makes perfect. The more you post on a blog and social media, the more you’ll learn what works, what people are interested in, what’s helpful to them etc.
Zoo: A reminder to go outside and not just look at the screen all day – your best examples for social media and blog posts will be the stories that are happening to you, your staff and business in real life – take a trip to the zoo is our new metaphor for “Get out there!”