20 Reasons Localization Is Essential To Website Conversions

Thanks to the global reach of the internet, website localisation is one of the best things you can do to increase website conversions. By creating a culture- and language-specific version of your website for each demographic market you target, you become a truly international business. All businesses, even small online retailers, can benefit from localization. In fact, you can’t afford not to have localized websites, and here are 20 reasons why.

1. It offers global expansion and increased reach.

Although English is still the predominant language online, other languages, most notably Chinese, Spanish, French, and Arabic, are quickly closing the distance. Offering web content in additional languages and cultures helps you increase your reach and become a respected international business.

2. Localization helps you appeal to multicultural audiences.

Translation helps international visitors find and buy from you, but it doesn’t consider cultural differences and sometimes doesn’t convey your message or brand very well. Localization includes both cultural and linguistic concerns, helping you reach audiences in different cultures much better.

3. It increases web traffic.

Search engines rank websites with localized versions or pages higher than non-localized websites and return your website as a result more often. On top of that, local sites are more likely to link to you when you provide information in the local language. Increasing traffic is one of the three most important things you can do to boost revenue, and more traffic means more sales.

4. You get more traffic from regional and language-specific search engines.

These smaller search engines have much less competition because they’re small and most businesses don’t have localized websites to appear in results. This means it’s much easier for your localized websites to rank higher than your English website. The higher you rank and the more often your website appears in search results, the more traffic and sales you get.

5. Localization increases brand recognition.

When you translate your website into the language and culture of your target market, you show that you respect and value your audience. They in turn are more aware of your business than your English-only competitors because they see your website more often and more easily understand your message.

6. Localization increases website stickiness and sales.

Having a strong localization plan boosts your presence and sales in a targeted area, such as localizing in French and German to increase sales in Europe. Multiple studies have found that when users are presented with a website in their native language, they stay on the site twice as long and are four times more likely to make a purchase from it.

7. It increases overall ROI.

Increased traffic, conversions, and brand awareness also leads to increased trust, credibility, customer loyalty, and satisfaction, in turn leading to more conversions. Localization is also scalable for both your audience and your budget, delivering huge benefits for only a marginal additional cost.

8. Localization maintains low printing and content distribution costs.

Localizing your website increases reach without raising these costs a few ways. First, you can reuse much of the same content across multiple languages; second, translating your website into a new language and culture is scalable; finally, having a web presence costs the same no matter what language or culture. Having a localized website may also eliminate the need for direct mail such as catalogs and brochures in various languages.

9. It is a cost-effective virtual branch office or satellite location.

Instead of building a brick-and-mortar store or renting an office in an international location, your localized websites become those virtual stores by offering information, products, contacts, and everything else you can deliver digitally.

10. Localization lowers customer support costs.

By answering questions and providing information in a target market’s native language and culture, you give customers what they need online in the best format for them, which reduces the need for multilingual phone and chat support.

11. It allows you to target minorities in your own area.

Many countries have large subgroups with their own languages, cultures, and skyrocketing purchasing power, such as the Latino market in the USA. Creating localized websites for these groups helps you solidify your presence and boost sales in your own area.

12. Localization maintains brand image and voice across cultures.

The problem with straight translation is that it doesn’t consider cultural differences and doesn’t always maintain your branding message. Localization is better than translation because it considers communication, sales incentive, design, layout, and programming specific to each culture and area, so you don’t lose the integrity of your brand across languages.

13. You become a local business.

Localizing your website turns you into a local business, which boosts conversions because many people want to buy locally, you get more traffic from local keywords, and you have an easier time building brand awareness.

14. Localization makes your local marketing stronger.

When you have a website specific to a certain area’s language and culture, your local internet marketing efforts (including search engine optimization, directory listings, and social media) benefit from having a local resource to point visitors to.

15. It makes you more trustworthy and credible.

By using the area’s local slang, idioms, metaphors, and figures of speech, you can communicate with your target customers more easily and directly, reducing confusion and boosting your own reputation.

16. Localization appeals to more customers.

Most web users don’t buy products online in a language other than their own. By offering them that option, you attract more prospects and close more sales.

17. It means fewer abandoned carts.

Programming can be as much a barrier as language or culture. Localization includes proper programming to prevent backend problems such as forms that make it difficult to input personal and payment info. Fewer problems means more closed sales and higher average order value.

18. Localization makes payment easier.

When you enable local credit cards, shipping and tax codes, and buying practices, your localized websites attract customers that would shop elsewhere otherwise, boosting your ROI, conversions, and revenue.

19. It increases local sales.

Offering products, support, FAQs, and other information in your customers’ native languages makes them more likely to buy from you because they have all the information they need in a format they understand to make an informed purchase.

20. Localization increases revenue.

Most consumers care more about language than price. So even if they know they can find a product cheaper somewhere else, they are more likely to buy from you at full price if you have a localized website for them.

How to make the internet a better place with SEO? by Matt cutts

Does Google Consider SEO to be spam?
A 3 years old video by Mat Cutts that answers a question people still ask.

And the answer is yet the same and will still be the same:

SEO, Stands for Search Engine Optimization, is about trying to make sure that your pages are well represented to search engines. 

How?

• By making sure the site crawlable (Robots, sitemaps, etc.)
• Finding the Right keywords (KW and competitors research)
• Usability and design (titles, headers, landing pages, content, multimedia)
• Speed 
• Responsiveness (is it mobile and tablet friendly or not)
• Update rate (How frequent the site adds new content, and how valuable and informative it is)? 

Read more: Search Engine optimization Starter Guide

The Future of SEO is Taking your Visitors to Your Company's Kitchen

Many of you must have heard of Google's new R&D projects to emulate human interactions on website to base their ranking algorithm on the user experience and whether the visited site offered a perceived value or not.

That is why the future of SEO will not be keywords or backlinks but "Users"
Therefore, site owners need to offer a true user experience to their visitors by being more transparent with them. i.e. involving them in the kitchen :


So, Forget about the famous quote, attributed to Otto von Bismarck: 

Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.

How To Be More Transparent?

1. Add a company page.
2. Add images to your company page (let your visitors see you.)
3. Add team video. Let your visitors see and hear you and your team
4. Photos or video of your office. Let your visitors see where you work and what you offices look like.
5. Don’t hide your phone number. This is a huge red flag.
6. Integrate your social media accounts
7. Show customer reviews and testimonials
8. Embed a Google map of your office
9. Show a photo and name of your sales person on the sales or contact page
10. Don’t use stock photos of people in offices. Instead take real photos of your people in your offices.
11. If you sell services, then describe your process
12. If you sell products, then show how they get made

(I know a Toronto based SEO company called Powered By Search that has an animated photo of their office on the Main header on the Home Page showing visitors their employees while working.) 

Here are some extra guidelines from the Stanford Web Credibility Project: 

Resources:

1. http://credibility.stanford.edu/ 
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Web_Credibility_Project
3. http://blog.seogroup.com/the-most-important-website-trend-in-2014-is/

How to find a Broken Backlink? The 404 Analysis Method

You may ask a client, supplier, blogger or whatever to add a link to one of your pages to get some link juice or referrals, but they may do a typo and add a wrong link URL to your site that when clicked it ends visitors up on a 404 not found page. So, how can you know those bad links?!

Here are some ideas to track those links and report them:

1- In the header template of your 404 page, find this line in your Google Analytics Tracking Code: _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); Then change it as follows: _gaq.push(['_trackPageview','/404error/?url=' + document.location.pathname + document.location.search + '&ref=' + document.referrer]); What's happening here is we're creating a virtual pageview that starts with /404error/ (you can name it anything you want) and then appending 2 made-up parameters to help us spot the source of the problem:

• · "url=" will catch the URL which a visitor attempted to access. 
• · "ref=" will catch the referring page. 

Here's what it will look like in your reports (when you do a search for "404error")

2- Another way is use Raven's GA Config tool. Simply add your GA account number then copy the Google Analytics tracking script just before the </head> tag on your 404 page (not your entire website). 

The code will be like this:

Asynchronous

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];

 _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);

  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/404.html?page=' + document.location.pathname + document.location.search + '&from=' + document.referrer]);

  (function() {

    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;

    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';

    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);

  })();

</script>

Traditional ga.js

<script type="text/javascript">

var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? " https://ssl." : "http://www.");

document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + " google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));

</script>

<script type="text/javascript">

try{

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXX-X");

pageTracker._trackPageview("/404.html?page=" + document.location.pathname + document.location.search + "&from=" + document.referrer);

} catch(err) {}

</script>

3- More ways:

http://ralphvanderpauw.com/digital-analytics/google-analytics-best-to-track-404-error-pages/ 

Best Analytics Solution and Page Tracking for Chrome and Firefox

   Take advantage of the power of page tagging and track important pages that indicate your business KPIs, such as the thank you page after a purchase is made. I suggest that you list all the important URLs you wish to target.

   You can use a Tool Called WASP (or Web Analytics Solution Profiler) to check if a tag was correctly inserted in your pages. When you run this extension, you can see below all the tags that are inserted in your pages and the scripts related to each.

   Wasp allows you to do quality assurance of your web analytics tags faster than ever. Test and debug your tags, save time, see detected values, find missing tags and beacons, detect double tagging, capture Flash events and export results.

   You can download it for Chrome or Firefox. 

Here are the Chrome features: http://webanalyticssolutionprofiler.com/chrome/features

and the Firefox Features are also here: http://webanalyticssolutionprofiler.com/firefox/features 

Link Audit Formula: What to Do if Google Detected a Pattern of Artificial or Unnatural Links Pointing to Your Site?

Even if you do not do any kind of Black hat SEO, or involved in any unnatural link building schemes, you may find a message from Google telling you that you have been penalized. 

I once got this message from Google Webmaster Tools:

Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to gouverneur.com/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site.

---

Recommended action

• Use the Links to Your Site feature in Webmaster Tools to download a list of links to your site.
• Ensure that unnatural links pointing to your site are removed.
• When these changes are made, and you are satisfied that links to your site follow Google's Webmaster Guidelines, submit a reconsideration request. If you're unable to remove links pointing to your site, please provide as much detail as possible in your reconsideration request.
• For an updated list of manual actions currently applied to your site, visit the Manual Actions page. If no manual actions are listed, there is no longer a need to file a reconsideration request.

If we determine your site is no longer in violation of our guidelines, we'll revoke the manual action.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum.

If you got it too and do not know what to do, I believe it is time for a Deep Link Audit.

Let's Start:

Collecting the Link Data

To get a complete backlink profile, you will need a paid subscription to a backlink checker. Everyone seems to have a “favorite”, but any of the “Big 4” SEOmoz, Majestic SEO, Link Research Tools or Ahrefs will do the job.

We will be focusing on the following link characteristics:

·         The URL of the page linking to you

·         The URL on your site that is being linked to

·         The IP of the URL linking to you

·         The anchor text used

·         The Percentage (Mix) of Anchor text

·         The follow/nofollow status of the link

·         A measure (rank) of the link’s trust & authority

To begin, enter the URL to audit into the backlink tool. Next, export the data into a CSV file. Sort in ascending value (low to high) by domain/trust/Moz/Cemper whatever rank. In theory this will provide you with a list of links in the order of weakest to strongest. I say “In Theory” as some of the weakest links may be harmless, and some powerful paid links may be killing you. There is no pure algorithmic solution. To do a link audit correctly, requires a manual review.

Analyzing the Link Data

Links that need to be reviewed and considered for removal are the following:

Links that appear on a domain that isn't indexed in Google.

This usually signals a quality problem. A quick way to test for this is to run a “site” command:

Example: “Site:haveresults.com”

sometimes a perfectly good site isn’t indexed, because of a bad robots.txt, like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This usually happens when a website leaves the development stage, but the robots.txt isn’t changed to allow the search engines to crawl the site. That’s why a manual review is important.

Links that appear on a website with a malware or virus warning.

This is pretty self explanatory.

Links that appear on the same page as spammy, unrelated links.

Run the Google Search Command: inurl:links sex,viagra,payday loans and you can find unlimited hacked pages, too.

Links that appear on a page with Google PageRank that is gray bar or zero.

This usually signals poor quality or low trust, but it could also indicate a new page that hasn’t been updated in the PR bar. Gray PR is not the same as PR 0 (zero). The graybar is sometimes a quality indicator, but doesn’t necessarily mean that the site is penalized or de-indexed. Many low quality, made for SEO directories, have a gray bar or PR 0.

Links coming from link networks.

Link networks are a group of websites with common registrars, common IPs, common C-blocks, common DNS, common analytics and/or common affiliate code. Chances are, if a group of websites shares a common ip, you will also find some of the other characteristics of a link network, so that’s where I look first. If using Ahrefs, you would navigate to Domain reports>yourwebsite.com>IPs and get a report like this:

Then Drill down to Domain reports>yourwebsite.com>referring domains, to discover a crappy network

Sitewide Links – especially blogroll and footer links.

Most are unnatural and none pass the juice that they once did.

Watch for exceptions to the rule: After a manual review, I am able to determine that in this case, the first sitewide link found in the tool is natural and there is no need to remove it:. Just one more example of why human intervention is necessary to get a link audit right.

Paid links.

If you are attempting to recover from a manual penalty, every paid link must be removed. No exception. The Google spam team spends all day every day rooting out paid links. After a while, spotting a paid link becomes second nature. That juicy link that you are certain that you can slip by Google will stick out like a sore thumb to the trained eye and will only prolong the agony of a manual penalty.

Beyond specific link types, which could be considered “suspicious”, there are new link rules that need to be reviewed and adhered to in a Post Penguin era.

Post-Penguin Link Audit Considerations

Keep in mind that Penguin is just the latest anti link spam algorithm rolled out by Google. They are hammering websites built on link schemes and rewarding sites with a natural backlink profile. A natural profile contains an assortment of link types, pointing to a website. Your audit should turn up a good mix of:

·         Brand links: Variations include: Your Domain, YourDomain.com, www.YourDomain.com, YourDomain.

·         Exact-match anchor text keyword links: These anchor text links should point to the most appropriate page on the website (the one you are optimizing).

·         Partial-match keyword links: It’s important not to over-optimize with exact match keywords, otherwise you could trip a phrase based filter.

·         Generic Links: Like “Read More” or “Click Here.” Keep in mind that good content should fill this need with little if any work required on your part.

·         Page title links: Some of your links should be the same as your page title.

There are some good tools on the market like Link Detox and Remove’em to help you with link audits and even link removals. The key takeaway is that no matter what tool you are using, a human review is going to be necessary to “get it right.” Leaving it to metrics alone is a formula for failure.

What follows is a step-by-step, tactical walkthrough of exactly how to perform a link profile audit, and how to figure out which links should be removed and/or disavowed.

What you’ll need:

• Scrapebox (A tool every SEO must have in their arsenal)
• Proxies for Scrapebox (optional, recommended. I recommend going for the “Bonanza” package from the “Exclusive Proxies” section.)
• Microsoft Excel

Find Your Anchor Text Ratio

To get started, we need to analyze the most important signal that Google’s Penguin algorithm looks for: over-optimization of anchor text.

Step 1: Get a list of your website’s inbound links and put the list in your Excel spreadsheet. You can get this information from the following sources:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Majestic SEO
• SEOMoz‘s Open Site Explorer
• Ahrefs

For the most complete information, try to combine data from all four sources. However, I recommend just using the data from your Google Webmaster Tools account. It’s free, and usually about as thorough as you’ll get from the other sources. Plus, it’s straight from Google. For this walkthrough, we’ll assume you’re using the list from your Webmaster Tools account.

Note: To get a list of your inbound links from Google Webmaster Tools, follow the steps below:

1. Login to Google Webmaster Tools
2. Click your Website
3. Click “Traffic” on the left navigation
4. Click “Links to your site”
5. Click “Who links the most”
6. Click “Download latest links”

Step 2: Run your list of links through Scrapebox to get the anchor text of each link. For a detailed walkthrough of how to set up Scrapebox, load proxies, etc., please see my post on how to use Scrapebox to find guest blogging opportunities. Depending on how long your list of links is, and how many proxies you’re using, this step could take a long time.

For lists of links that are 1,000 or less, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. But several nights ago, I ran a report on a list of links that was over 43,000, and I had to let Scrapebox run over night in order to complete.

Step 3: Export the report to Excel on your desktop. You may need to open and re-save the file after you export it, because for some reason it often corrupts immediately after export. Opening and re-saving the spreadsheet should fix it.

Step 4: Within your spreadsheet, sort your columns as such:

• Column A: Source URL
• Column B: Destination URL
• Column C: Anchor Text
• Column D: Found?

Step 5: Sort column D by alphabetical order and remove all rows in which column D’s value is anything other than “Found.” You’ll likely see lots of “Not Found,” “Error 404″ and such from the Scrapebox output, which should be removed.

Step 6: Delete Column D (it’s no longer necessary).

Step 7: Add a new Column D with header “Number of Anchor Occurrences.”

Step 8: In cell D2, enter the following formula: =COUNTIF($C$2:$C$6633,C2).

Note: Change “6633″ in the above formula to whatever the number of the last row of your data set is.

Step 9: Apply this formula to all rows in column D by clicking in cell D2 and then clicking the box in the lower-right of the cell, and dragging it down the entire length of Column D. You’ll now have a list of the number of occurrences of each anchor text in the spreadsheet.

Step 10: Open a new tab (or worksheet) within your spreadsheet and paste in the data from Columns C and D.

Step 11: That data will still contain the formulas in the cells, so we need to remove that. To do so, copy/paste the data from columns C and D into notepad. Then, re-copy and paste it back into your new worksheet. The values for “Number of anchor occurrences” will now be absolute values rather than formulas.

Step 12: Now, it’s time to remove duplicates. Remove duplicates by highlighting your two columns, then going to the “Data” tab in Excel and clicking “Remove Duplicates.” In the ensuing popup box, make sure both columns are checked and then click OK.

Step 13: Add a new column C with header “Percent of Total.”

Step 14: Sort by Column B (“Number of anchor occurrences”) from largest to smallest.

Step 15: Scroll down to the last row containing data, and in column B, in the cell directly below the cell containing the last piece of data, enter the following formula: =SUM(B2:B6633).

This will result in the total number of links.

Note: Change “6633″ in the above formula to whatever the number of the last row of your data set is.

Step 16: In Column C (“Percent of Total”), click in cell C2 and type the following formula: =B2/$B$422.

Note: Change “422″ in the above formula to the number of the row that contains the total number of links, which you created in step 15.

Step 17: Change the format of the values in Column C to “Percentage” with two decimal points. You can do this by highlighting the column, right-clicking, and selecting “Format Cells” then changing the “Category” setting to “Percentage.”

Step 18: Apply this formula to all rows in column C. You should now have a list of percentages of anchor text as a ratio of the entire link profile.

Step 19: Highlight in red any rows in which the anchor text exceeds 2 percent of the overall link profile, EXCEPT the following anchor types:

• Brand anchors
• Naked URLs
• Images (i.e. no anchor text)

The remaining highlighted anchor text is the anchor text for which your inbound link profile is over-optimized.

If you’ve made it this far and found no over-optimized anchor text in your inbound link profile, congratulations! You’re probably not a target of Google Penguin. If you did find over-optimized anchor text, read on.

Analyze Your Referring Domains

Next, it’s time to get a list of referring domains, and gather some metrics on each one so we can determine whether we have any domains that need to be completely disavowed.

Step 20: Copy/paste your list of links into a Notepad file.

Step 21: Load that file into Scrapebox using the “Import URL list” button.

Step 22: Click “Trim to Root”

Step 23: Click “Remove/Filter” then click “Remove Duplicate Domains.”

Step 24: Click “Check PageRank” and “Get Domain PageRank” to get the domain PR of each domain.

Step 25: Export the list of domains using the “Import/Export URLs & PR” button.

Step 26: Copy/paste the output from your newly exported file back into your Excel spreadsheet and sort by PR from largest to smallest.

Find Out Which Links and Domains Need to Be Disavowed or Removed

Now, it’s time to figure out which links and domains need to be removed or disavowed.

Step 27: Refer to your list of anchor text percentages. Find the first highlighted anchor (from Step 19) and note what the anchor is.

Step 28: Return to your Scrapebox output with the column that includes anchor text, and sort by anchor text, in alphabetical order.

Step 29: Scroll down the list of anchors until you find the first occurrence of the anchor you noted in step 27.

Step 30: Copy/paste all link URLs containing that anchor into a new worksheet titled “links to disavow.”

Step 31: Repeat steps 27-30 for all anchor texts highlighted in red from Step 19.

Step 32: Refer again to your list of anchor text percentages. Go through each anchor and eyeball any anchors that are completely unrelated to the niche or maliciously and obviously spam (for example, porn, gambling, or viagra-related anchors). Add all links containing these anchors to your “links to disavow” worksheet in addition to a new, separate list.

Step 33: Load your list of links from the “links to disavow” worksheet into Scrapebox and get the domain PageRank of each link.

Step 34: Copy/paste the output from your newly exported file back into your Excel spreadsheet and sort by PR from largest to smallest.

Step 35: Highlight all links with a PR of 4 or below, and all links with malicious or completely unrelated anchor text.

Step 36: Add the highlighted links to your “links to disavow” list. Now, it’s time to figure out which domains to completely disavow.

Step 37: Copy/paste your list of links from Step 33 (your “links to disavow” spreadsheet) into a Notepad file.

Step 38: Load that Notepad file into Scrapebox and repeat steps 20-26.

Step 39: Add all domains with PR 2 or below to your disavow list.

Step 40: Eyeball the remaining domains and highlight any that don’t end in the following extensions (unless you’re sure you don’t want to remove them):

• .com
• .net
• .org

Step 41: Add the highlighted domains to your “links to disavow” list.

You should now have a list that contains the following:

• A list of links that contain anchor text for which your inbound link profile is over-optimized, which reside on a domain that’s PR 4 or less
• A list of links that contain spammy, malicious, or completely unrelated anchor text
• A list of domains that contain links to your website with over-optimized anchor text and are also PR 2 or less
• A list of domains with domain extensions that are not .com, .net or .org

To disavow an entire domain, use the following format:

domain:spamdomain1.com
domain:spamdomain2.com
domain:spamdomain3.com

To disavow individual links from a domain, use the following format:

http://spamdomain4.com/contentA.html

http://spamdomain5.com/contentB.html

http://spamdomain6.com/contentC.html

Your disavow list should look like this:

domain:spamdomain1.com
domain:spamdomain2.com
domain:spamdomain3.com
http://spamdomain4.com/contentA.html

http://spamdomain5.com/contentB.html

http://spamdomain6.com/contentC.html

Step 42: When you’re ready to submit your list of links to disavow, follow Google’s official instructions on how to do so.

Closing Thoughts

• If you have access to the SEOMoz API, feel free to substitute domain authority (DA) as your metric rather than PageRank. This is a more accurate metric to use, but it’s expensive to use it in bulk. In step 35, substitute PR 4 with DA 40 or below. In Step 39, substitute PR 2 with DA 30 or below.

• Why did I choose 2 percent as the threshold for over-optimization? I’ve done at least 50 inbound link profile audits, and in my experience, the sweet spot appears to be about 2 percent.  The 2 percent figure is purely based on my hands-on experience in the field working with real clients who were penalized by Google Penguin.

• How did I come up with the specific PR and DA thresholds for disavowal? Again, this is based purely on my experience in the field. There’s no textbook that’ll tell you the “right” number(s) or even metrics to use.

Source: 
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-know-which-links-to-disavow-in-google/50709/
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2207168/How-to-Conduct-a-Link-Audit