Expanding your services beyond your own country can be a tricky process. Unfortunately, SEO-savvy techniques and a simple foreign language duplication of your website simply won’t be enough to reach a broader audience. There are a number of problems to tackle and points to consider here; besides the fact that, in most cases, you need to be located in the target-country in order to get a local domain, you now have two websites to maintain which can be extremely time consuming. Any changes you want to make in your original website now need to be made in your secondary one as well. You can imagine how that can become even harder if you wish to have multiple language versions of your website.

So, how to avoid all this hassle while still attaining your goal of branching out beyond your own country? The answer is simple; create a single multilingual website. First off, by using a main, English-version website and adding the translation to the layers for your target-countries, you can effortlessly modify and enrich any part of your online content without having to worry about repeating the same process for any other websites. This will also create less confusion for your visitors who are wondering why there are seven different versions of the same webpage.

Also, when looking to expand overseas, it might be best to choose a Top Level Domain (TLD) that is suitable for your marketplace. Instead of limiting yourself to an .eu or .uk domain, why not go for the broadly used .com domain and include visitors from all over the globe?

Now it’s time to translate your original content in the language of your targeted audience. Translation is arguably the most important part of building an international website, as you want your audience to have a genuine, native-like experience while browsing through your webpages. Surely you wouldn’t trust Google to translate your technical terms in Hindi or Zulu, right?

Find out more about how we can help you improve your website and branch out to a multilingual audience here.