3 tips for increasing leads from your international website

If your business is targeting customers overseas, then it is vital that your website is optimised for international. By having a website that is adapted to the needs of your international customers, you can grow your sales, brand reputation and customer base in your export markets.

But how do you go about international website optimisation? Targeting international markets can be a daunting task, especially if you only have experience in your domestic market.

Luckily, Norma Foster, International Growth Consultant and Director at No Fuss Group Ltd, has written a guide that explores how to optimise your international website in order to increase leads – and this blog post will pick out and examine three key tips!

1. Adapt your content to the local language

Localise your website’s language for your target markets. Here is a useful checklist for when you are creating multilingual content for international markets:

• Write in English first.
• Finalise the English version of the copy.
• Translate professionally.
• Proofread professionally.
• Check with native-speaking team members, agents, distributors or partners.
• Even better, use local language copywriters.
• Be aware that some languages take up more space than English.
• Do a final check once the translated content has been published on the website, to make sure there are no layout/display issues.

You should also create all your webpages’ meta data in the local language. Your meta titles (the title that shows in the search engine results pages) and meta descriptions (the paragraph describing the website) are very important. No matter how good your website is, if your meta data is not attractive and compelling, people are unlikely to visit your website.

2. Do customer profiling for all your different target markets

In order to reach your target customers effectively, you need to have a clear understanding of who they are. Many companies have disparate databases, so the first step is to pull these all together into one customer database.

You should then review any trends and themes you may spot and select your core customer groups (it is recommended to focus on no more than five), and target and prioritise those.

You then want to identify the key decision maker in each customer group and profile that particular individual, because that is the person you are selling to.

Once you know this information, you can really start to create compelling marketing messages that are tailored to the needs of your customers. Just remember that you will want to do separate customer profiling for your customers in all your different target markets.

3. Plan early for your international content strategy

Plan 12 months ahead and look at your key events as a company and also those of your different customer groups in each target country. That gives you a great overview for your content, which you can then share in advance with any content contributors. You can also invite international content creators to write content in their native language.

Make sure you have a specific call-to-action for each piece of content that you post. And, of course, share it and include a call-to-action on your blog and social media channels. When sharing on social media, take snackable chunks of the full article and include links back to the article. After all, the job of social media is to drive traffic back to your website, where you can then convert interest into sales.

I hope this blog post has given you a useful introduction to how to increase leads from your international website. For more in-depth information and advice, read the full-length guide here. This guide looks at the following six steps to internationalise your website:

• why to internationalise
• adapt to the local language and culture
• target customers more effectively
• be more visible – increase traffic and leads
• plan early for your international content strategy
• measure, monitor and maintain

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Elin Box

Content Marketing Manager at Webcertain

Elin is a Content Marketing Manager at Webcertain. She is responsible for Webcertain’s Self-learning platform, producing in-depth guides on a range of international digital marketing topics. She also helps run the Webcertain blog and is the writer of the Webcertain search and social report, an annual report summarising digital marketing best practices in over 50 countries. She is passionate about educating and empowering people to make the best decisions for their business and is proud to help share Webcertain’s wealth of digital marketing knowledge with the world. Elin is from the UK.

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