You’re in the business of welcoming guests from all over the world. Is your website welcoming them as well? Even if travelers understand some English, they won’t feel perfectly at home unless you showcase all you have to offer in their own native language.
Localization can be the quickest, easiest way to boost your hotel website, bringing in new visitors from all over the world. Shouldn’t your site give them a taste of the awesome hospitality they’ll find once they walk through your doors?
Top 5 tips to translate and localize your hotel website
1. Translation and localization aren’t the same thing
Hotel website translation is a hugely important step in localizing your site. But it’s not the only step. There are lots of hotel website translation services out there, but most of them will hand you a translation and then step out of the picture.
Your site isn’t static – and your translation shouldn’t be either. That’s why you need a localization management tool that can make changes to any multilingual versions of your site, every single time you update. Content management is another huge piece of the localization puzzle that hotel website translation tools can’t provide.
2. Don’t miss out on crucial SEO
With some hotel translation services, your entire site gets lumped in together, so it doesn’t rank well when visitors are doing native-language searches. You’re essentially throwing away the money you spent on localization – because nobody’s going to know you’re out there.
Make sure you choose a localization management tool that’s going to separate out every language for SEO, and offer features like:
- Customized URLs for each language
- Translated meta content, tags, script messages, and more
- Localized keywords, anchor texts, titles, script messages, and many other elements
Lots of companies make the mistake of stopping once their site text is translated. The best localization management tools go deeper, so all your localized content counts when potential visitors are searching for you.
3. Make site design a top priority
Every visitor to your site deserves a first-class experience. You’ve worked long and hard creating your hotel’s brand and your website should reflect that.
Localization doesn’t have to make your site uglier or less functional. In fact, you should be choosing a localization tool that maximizes the user experience in every single language. From incorporating a custom language selector to suit your site’s design to ensuring that text flows properly in every language, localization is often about the little design touches that make a huge difference to visitors.
4. Don’t forget your visuals
And while we’re talking about site design… remember the old saying that a picture is worth 1,000 words? Think about what your site’s pictures are saying about your hotel. Do all the graphics, images, and photos reflect the audience you’re trying to attract? Would certain types of food appeal more to people from different regions? And most importantly: is there text in your original language embedded in any of your site’s images?
When you’re choosing a localization management tool, pick one that lets you customize your site’s images for each language so you’re not stuck sharing the exact same pictures with guests from different parts of the world and different cultural orientations.
5. Choose a tool that’s easy to set up and update
Satisfied clients have told us Bablic is the best tool out there for hotel website translation & localization:
“Bablic is a user-friendly translation solution allowing for a near seamless blend of human and machine translations. Most hotels do not have the budget or resources to effectively manage websites in multiple languages and 100% machine translations often miss the mark. With Bablic, machines do the heavy lifting while providing an on-site visual editor to make corrections and optimizations in each language. Since adoption, both traffic and conversions have increased in each of our key languages. “
Evan Crawford, Director of Field Marketing Support.
Why do they love it so much?
With Bablic’s simple, intuitive Visual Editor, advanced design and CSS features and seamless integration with every site builder, hosting or ecommerce platform out there, their localized site is up and running in no time. And Bablic handles ongoing site updates and changes with minimal intervention. Just like you, they’ve got a hotel to run and can’t make localization their full-time job.
Ready to localize your hotel website? You’re in luck. Bablic lets you try it out for free for 14 days. So you can see just how easy it is.
As this post explains in more detail, Bablic has thought of everything to help ensure that your localization process is completely hassle free. And because Bablic is 100% SEO friendly, new guests will find you quickly–wherever they’re coming from. Make Bablic your first step in opening your hotel’s doors to the entire world.