I read a Hitwise article explaining how rising Polish population in the UK is reflected in the number of Polish websites visited from the UK. It seems that the Google’s third most visited website within the UK is Google.pl and UK internet traffic to Polish websites has been significantly increasing recently in line with an ever increasing Polish population in the UK, which is expected to be around 1 million now. (Reference)
Obviously this should have impacts on the Polish businesses’ online marketing and revenue generation strategies. For example, now they will need to consider including the UK in their PPC or even SEO targeting.
In a similar way, the UK based companies should also start considering whether it would be worth to consider serving this big immigrant community in their own language. There are already some companies who advertise in Polish or other languages or in some non-English community papers, but there seems not much going on in online arena. Therefore, there would be very cost effective gains if the online channel is utilised. For example, the cost per click will be much lower for a mortgage ad in Polish of a mortgage company who has Polish speaking mortgage adviser in the UK than the English one, as there is much less competition.
So, considering the large immigrant communities in the UK in online marketing strategy and media buying will be an interesting approach for the UK businesses.
Fatih Gulgonul
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Immigration has always been about the children, if you want them to be isolated into ethnic enclaves and still not pick up English until grade 2 you are doing them a huge disservice. I wouldn’t exaggerate the trend though, the overwhelming majority of immigrants who never pick up the language are smart enough to see the bennefits of their children doing so.
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Angelinjones
Transmitter
One very big issue for non-English sites is the lack of accessibility. Most users have to have different tools (keyboards, software) to be able to search for non-English content. Especially for non-Latin languages. Enabling searching for non-English content as seamless as searching for English content will help international sites attract more traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo and others.
Linguaseek is one such search engine. Actually a front-end to all your favorite search engines. It provides transliteration and searching in one step to virtually all digitally available languages. Take a look at http://www.linguaseek.com/
It is a free and ad-free site interested only in enabling mulitilingual searching.
http://www.linguaseek.com/
There are even UK businesses starting to optimise their own website in Polish. An example is the UK Broadband ISP, Plusnet:
http://www.plus.net/pl/
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