As many of us head into budget season, I thought it would be useful to look at some of the steps you can take to improve translation ROI. Either lower costs or higher revenue will boost your ROI, and there are things you can do on both sides of this equation.
1. Don’t skip on Multilingual SEO
Multilingual SEO is first on the list if you’re looking for ways to boost translation ROI. If your customers can’t find you, you don’t even get to start the race! I know this sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how many customers spend precious budget translating website content, and then ignore Multilingual SEO. Translating SEO titles and meta descriptions is a little tricky, but with good process will turn it into a vital but routine part of your content creation process. Our SEO plugin is a great way to make the process quick and simple, just ask us for a demo.
2. A/B Test your Headlines & CTAs
Headlines and CTAs are low volume, high impact copy which deserve creative attention. If you’ve agonised over the right wording for a crucial headline, you know what I’m talking about. You can’t just translate these elements, you need transcreation. You should also try different versions of the translation in a controlled A/B test so you really know you have picked the version which will deliver conversions and boost translation ROI.
3. Be smart about what you translate
It’s hard to decide what to translate, and into which languages. Building a translation strategy will help you think through which content has the greatest impact, and which markets have the most potential. It’s surprising how often these crucial decisions are made on-the-fly and without proper strategic consideration — a recipe for poor translation ROI. We can help you build a translation strategy, prioritising markets and content categories to make your translation budget go further.
4. Make the most of the technology to boost translation ROI
Everyone should be using Translation Memory. It’s a cornerstone of efficient translation and often reduces translation costs by 30-40%. As your Translation Memory builds, so should your savings. Beyond TM, you have probably wondered whether Machine Translation is an option. We had a long blog post asking whether MT is good enough yet, but the short answer is: it’s getting better all the time and you should take a look. We will analyse your content and see whether your content and language combinations are a good fit for MT.
5. Reduce internal costs to improve translation ROI
Too many organisations ignore the workload of managing their translation projects. While you can argue that your own staff are a fixed cost and so don’t impact ROI, the reality is that they’re probably the biggest cost for the business. Even if they are a “fixed cost”, wouldn’t you rather have them do something more useful than copy/paste translations into your CMS? There are many things you can do to reduce the internal cost of managing your translation project. For instance:
- set up a repeating schedule for translation projects
- integrate integrate your CMS with your translation services partner so your content can be extracted, translated and published automatically.
We offer a free review of your translation process and we can help reduce the time your team are spending on translations.