You have invested a lot of time and money in your website, and start seeing progress. You worked on every single detail of your website: content creation, copywriting, keyword research, appealing pictures, among a long list. But now you want to go a step further and reach a new audience.

You have a unique product that you know that can benefit a more people out there. That’s why you have decided to translate the content of your website, so your Spanish speaking audience can understand everything that this product can offer them. You have certainly made a great decision. Did you know that by doing this, you’ll reach 470 million people that speak Spanish out there?

But, how can you do this? Well, stay with me, I’ll show you the ropes!

1. Plan your budget to translate website content

Basically, there are two ways to do this: investing money or for free. Let’s see the differences.

• If you go for the free option: maybe you don’t have a budget or it’s not one of your priorities to invest in a professional translation. Fair enough. Then, you may consider installing a plugin that will automatically translate the content of your website. Obviously, this has its cons: of course, it won’t be a professional translation, the copy of your website in Spanish will have mistakes and your audience won’t understand all the content. Also, your website won’t rank for Spanish searches in search engines. You’ll be missing out all this organic traffic coming from your Spanish speaking audience.

• If you want to invest in a professional translation: (and this is the option that I’m going to be focusing on), when you invest in something, you get something in return; the more you invest, the more you gain, and this applies to every aspect of our lives. Would you trust a lawyer that represents you in court for free? Would you go to a new hairdresser to experiment with your hair for free? I doubt it. However, if you wisely invest in a professional service, I’m sure that you’ll get a lot of benefits from it in the long run. You can invest in different services that will boost the traffic of your website and attract new potential clients. Let’s see what a professional translation can do for your business:

2. Transcreation

Translating website content isn’t enough. There’re some parts of your website that must be transcreated. Trasncre… what?

In a nutshell, trancreate is to creatively translate different marketing messages so they can be adapted to the target audience and have the same impact as the original message. As you see, the focus here isn’t the words themselves, but the impact that these words will have in your business/marketing.

For example, the corporate name of your business or your slogan may have puns that can’t be literally translated into Spanish. What we do here is to focus on the core message of your business to come up with a catchy corporate name or slogan that works in Spanish.

Apple is a company that gets all its messages transcreated in a very creative way. In the Spanish ad, it literally says: “The change is in your hands”. Not quite the same as in the original, right? But it works perfectly fine in Spanish.

Trascreation could be the difference between a client exploring your website and the same client clicking “close” within 5 seconds.

3. Copywriting

Imagine your website without words. Impossible, right? The copy of your website is a n essential pillar of your sales. People normally read 20% of the text that is included in a website. Most people also made the decision of keeping reading your website or click the close button in less that 10 seconds. It’s up to us to make the most of these 10 seconds.

For me, copywriting is the path that we want our audience to follow through the copy of our website baring in mind a final objective, which can be a sale, a subscription to our mailing lists, fill a form, etc.

Investing in copywriting will make that this audience that we have attracted thanks to trascreation techniques keep reading our content. In order words, we are retaining them and make them stay with us for longer.

Copywriting is also a technique that will make our content unique through “the voice” of your business. It always looks to find an emotional connection between the brand and your clients, so they can feel understood and trust us though appealing texts that people actually want to read.

4. Cultural adaptation

As I mentioned before, translating a website is more than putting every word in different languages. There are some concepts that can be interpreted differently in another language or even in a different culture.

For example, it seems that the brand Chi-Chi’s didn’t spend too much time (or money) to think about the translation of its corporate name into Spanish, taking into account that “chichi” in Spanish isn’t a nice word to describe a part of the female body. Welcome to Chichi’s!

5. Keyword research

Also, if we want to attract as much organic traffic as possible from our Spanish speaking audience, you’ll have to set a strategy and chose specific keyword that can make our website rank higher in searching engines.

Conducting a keyword research before getting a website translated is essential. The translation of headlines and the content will depend on this research.

6. Content marketing

At this point your website is translated and transcreated by using copywriting techniques and a keyword research. Great! Your Spanish speaking audience starts to found your website online and exploring your content. And then, what?

If we don’t offer something to this new audience, we’ll lose them. What can we offer so they stay with us? Content.

Content in their language that they can understand. This content must be created having our new audience and objectives in mind. Content creating is the best way to nurture our audience and make it grow.

 

Have you ever implemented one of these strategies to translate your website? Did it work? I’d love to hear from you!

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