The Power of Localising Your Website
(03 October 2006)
Localising your website will not only localise the appeal of your business, but will keep your customers happy, users returning and can potentially increase your revenue as well writes Russell Berry, managing director of Desperate Seller.co.uk
Whilst traditional marketing is all about “pushing” products to consumers, on the internet, it’s all about “pulling” them to your site. Of course, there are search engines to help direct them to your site, email marketing, promotions, affiliates, links etc, but as a marketer it’s really up to you to create the pages that lead visitors the way they want to be led.
This means making sure your content or product or service is positioned in a way that is attractive and appealing to your target audience.
One way to do this is by localising your site. Localising, more than simply translating the language on your website is the process of making a product or service more acceptable to a specific market.
An example to demonstrate how localisation is effectively being used is on the BBC website – Where I Live. Once a visitor specifies where they live, the right-hand side of this page is localised for the returning user to see relevant local news headlines, weather forecasts and activities in their local area each time they visit the site.
To determine if your site can benefit from localisation, its worth having a close look at website statistics and customer details. Maybe your marketing reach has become far greater than the geographic territory that you cover? Maybe you have visitors coming from all over, but sales only coming from one county? Maybe your site is well design for its region but not for beyond?
Desperate Seller is a car selling and buying website set up in 1999. We recently localised our site by setting up a series of microsites to meet the increasing demand from independent car dealers across the country and to make it easier for consumers to find the car they are looking for.
We segmented the market by county and registered domain names for each one; i.e. hertfordshire.desperateseller.co.uk. The reason microsites were set up as opposed to just launching a new section in the main website is because a microsite allows you to focus on a specific purpose, such as selling clearance or discounted items, selling products to businesses vs. consumers, promoting new merchandise, or trying out a new product line.
Desperate Seller have found that by localising their site, the following benefits can be achieved:
Capitalise on changing keyword searches – people are getting more specific and local about the keywords they are using when searching on the internet. Instead of searching for a “Porsche Boxster for sale”, we’ve found they are more likely to search for a “Porsche Boxster for sale in Surrey”. The microsites have not only helped our natural listings, but we’ve been able to pick up additional traffic due to our localised sites.
Keep visitors returning – as the microsites are totally geared to a visitor’s area, they are getting completely relevant content as soon as they arrive on the site, making it a more appealing place to return to.
Supporting your customers – With just our main website, it was difficult to give our customers, the xx independent car dealers that use our site to sell their cars nationwide the exposure that they wanted. Now with the localised sites, we’ve been able to offer them more targeted exposure and incorporate some innovative features into the microsites to help them sell their cars quicker.
Increasing revenue – a localised strategy translates into a more targeted consumer base, which makes your site even more attractive to online advertisers. Desperate Seller have been able to secure local advertising on their microsites generating additional revenue for the business.
There are many ways that you can localise your site. It maybe as simple as just delivering pages on your site that are targeted to preferred navigation styles and decision patterns of a specific geographically defined population.
If you’re thinking about a microsite, then:
• Consider the costs. Building a microsite is essentially the same amount as setting up a traditional website. Keep in mind though, that a microsite does take a lot of work, so it’s worth evaluating whether the same results could be achieved by using your current online infrastructure.
• Take your brand strategy into account. If you sell products with two totally different focuses or brand identities, then you are a good candidate for a microsite
Do you have the content? A high volume of content is required to make the site relevant to visitors, so you need to weigh up whether individual microsites or a larger site with a lot of updated content would appeal more to your customers.
For further information, please visit; www.desperateseller.co.uk
For further information, please contact:
Katie Olver
Momentous PR
T: +44 (0) 208 614 6816
M: +44 (0) 781 484 5376
E: kolver@momentousuk.com
About Desperate Seller
Desperate Seller.co.uk is the UK’s premier car buying & selling website. Established in 1999, the site was the UK’s first to offer a multi-website car advertising model, designed to reduce the time, stress and money involved in buying and selling new and used cars. Now with over 130,000 new and used cars on the site, and powering used car classifieds for BBC’s Topgear.com,
Wisebuyers.co.uk, Excite.co.uk and Yahoo! Cars, Desperate Seller attracts a massive national audience of car buyers and sellers.
For further information on Desperate Seller, visit: www.desperateseller.co.uk
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