Question

Topic: Strategy

Localizing Web Site Content/experiences

Posted by Craig.Dowley on 4/25/2010 at 10:40 AM ET 400 Points
Over half of the visits to our corporate sites are from outside North America, we do offer 13 different sites to serve this large International audience. We would like to direct more users to the appropriates site(s). We do not leverage IP detection or any other process to direct users to the appropriate international sites. Could you share your current or future plans on managing/directing international traffic?
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by mgoodman on 4/25/2010 at 11:57 AM Moderator
    How are these site visitors finding you? Are you advertising somehow, or is this the result of organic search?

    The approach you take will depend on how they learn about and get to your site.
  • Posted on 4/25/2010 at 2:33 PM Member
    Are you providing similar service across these sites? If yes then what is the difference between the sites apart from localization? If no then you should route them using the IP address detection.
    Also use Google Analytics to see where your customers are coming from and what keywords are routing them to each of your websites. That will help you two fold:
    1. Help you see which countries are giving you traffic for which site
    2. Understand what keywords or channels are routing traffic to non local sites

    Use the country specific domain names so that the customers are not confused on why they are being routed.

    I skipped the IP based routing as Karen has already provided the help above
  • Posted on 4/25/2010 at 5:12 PM Member
    Let them choose. Use a landing page i.e.

    https://www.asus.com/entryflash.htm
  • Posted by Craig.Dowley on 4/25/2010 at 5:28 PM Author
    To provide a little more clarification we offer very similar content across all our international sites with the exception of translated product and other marketing content. For example we promote local marketing events on the various local sites.

    Users typcially find us through search engines, but our .com site almost always outranks our International sites. One of the primary reasons we want to drive users to the local sites is that we have found through our analytics package (Omniture) that visitors to our local sites typically convert at much higher rates. Which makes sense since the forms are usually in the local language of the site.

    Thanks for the comments regarding IP detection is this too intrusive of an approach? Do you know of any other site(s) that redirect users based on IP?
  • Posted by Harry Hallman on 4/26/2010 at 9:07 AM Accepted
    My guess is the site is more popular because it is .com. .com is a very common suffix worldwide.

    If you don't want to detect and redirect via ip (I agree with you on that) then put something on the main page that is easy to see and offers links to the various international sites. The link you have now is easiy missed especially if you don't speak English. What is your bounce rate? Perhaps people are coming to the site from other countries and leaving because it is not the local site.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 4/26/2010 at 9:07 AM Accepted
    Using IP address isn't foolproof - it depends on the user's host assignment. Users logging in with AOL, for example, are often seen as from the US, no matter where in the world they're actually located.

    If you don't want to use IP address, consider mapping using the user's language setting. This is good for major language differences, but won't be able to choose between variations of English, French, etc.:

    https://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/language.shtml
    https://www.globalme.net/localization-best-practices/web-localization-white...
  • Posted by Chris Blackman on 4/26/2010 at 9:49 AM Accepted
    Why not have a user selectable country setting on your home page, and ask the user if they would like to retain that setting? If so, give them a cookie and look for that in future visits.

    This is the way HP and Adobe do it. I'm sure it could work for you.

    If different country home pages are in non-English languages, visitors searching for specific terms should be finding those and arriving at the right page by default due to their search terms.

    Make sure all your different country/language landing pages are included in the site maps you feed to the major search engines.

    Also, ensure all your non-English pages are optimised for search engines too.



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