Probably the best way to instantly increase your traffic and boost engagement is to translate your website. In the graphic above you can appreciate that a significant amount of jordhy.com’s visitors come from non-English speaking countries. Some of them come from India, Russia, Brazil, France, Algeria, Spain and China. How can we lower bounce rates and boost traffic while keeping costs down? One answer is machine translation with some crowdsourced help.
Take for example, Spanish. The worldwide Spanish-speaking population represents about 7 % of the global Internet user base. You won’t believe the faces people put on when I tell them that Amtrak translated their website to five languages including Chinese! When you think about it for a second, it is clear how website translation could increase engagement significantly.
Why Amtrak has a Multilingual Website
– A lot of people taking the Amtrak are tourists with limited English knowledge
– Maybe the ticket buyer’s companion needs a website in his/her native language
– Multiple versions of a website in different languages provides free incoming web traffic from local search engines
– Boost your link profile by gaining editorial links from local publications that cater to foreign audiences
– Acquire cheaper traffic competing against Adwords of lower-bidding geographies
– Increase retention because competitors don’t provide such service!
– People are more likely to refer your service to their non-English speaking friends
Why Does Jordhy.com Have Such a Traffic Profile
Why do I have so many visitors from non-English speaking countries? The answer is quite simple: I blog considerably about website localization and internationalization practices, indeed a naturally internationally relevant subject of interest to a widely spread audience. These developers speak English, but maybe their friends don’t, maybe their managers don’t. So, a good rule of thumb is to prepare content for these use cases so your audience can share your website in their native tongues.
Jordhy.com Goes Multilingual
Starting next Monday, you’ll be able to read jordhy.com in multiple languages. The translations will be machine generated but I’ll revise the Spanish edition regularly. There will also be an option to annotate webpage so that translation becomes a crowdsourced effort.