Why You Should Translate Your Site in Italian

Posted on June 18, 2014 by gabriele monti

Emergence of Italian e-commerce

With over 63 million Italian speakers worldwide, today Italy is one of the fastest developing e-commerce markets in the world. Being third after China and India in terms of digital shopping growth rate, Italian-speaking consumers have been consistently creating a high demand for online retail businesses.
Since the beginning of e-commerce upsurge in 2010, the number of regular Italian e-shoppers has grown dramatically and is approaching 10 million at present time; this amount continues to rise as consumer confidence increases and internet shopping becomes a way of lifestyle.. Since English is a foreign tongue for most Italians, translating content into the native language of your potential customers might be a vital step of the marketing strategy and brand exposure.
Below are a few prominent reasons for launching your website in Italian:

Italian Language Experts in London – source

Overall Digital Market Penetration

Digital penetration in Italy has made a grand leap in recent years as online shopping has become a growing trend: in a country where 60% of the population have regular access to the internet connection, millions of buyers are making virtual purchases on a continual basis.
During the next two years from today the percentage of online shoppers is likely to exceed the 50% of the total population, while the number of transactions will reach beyond 180 million. As digital devices such as tablets and smartphones become more affordable web shopping intervenes into daily routine of Italian consumers. Meeting their satisfaction expectations by offering a translated version of your website is a most certain way to enhance user involvement and, potentially, boost your sales.

Growing E-commerce Opportunities

As an emerging market, Italy has a noticeably higher growth perspective than mature markets which are beyond an active extension phase.
While the vast majority of consumers still choose PC as their primary means of purchasing goods online, usage of tablets and mobile devices gradually becomes part of the e-shopping custom. Mobile apps accessible in the Italian language should benefit both users and business owners who are most interested to support the trend. Since mobile e-commerce spreading pattern is very similar to the PC shopping tendency, investing in apps and mobile pages translation should pay off in the long run.

Rising Consumer Confidence

Italian e-commerce proves to be on a steadily developing track backed by the rising consumer confidence. Whereas the digital shopping spree mostly influences younger sectors of the population, the prospects are that people aged 35 and up will fit the online shopping scenario. Consumers familiar with internet shopping have their own habits and expectations – comprehensive content and navigation are usually the most common ones; making your website available in the user’s native tongue may, therefore, be the decisive factor in the purchasing process.
***
The inception of e-commerce and online buying patterns have reshaped retail business models all around the internet world: targeting international audience imposes optimization adjustments, one of which is providing web-content in the prospect’s mother language; being the fourth most populated country in Europe with an intensively growing virtual shopping tendencies, Italian market is becoming a lucrative target for trading companies and global retailers.

The Role of Language Media LTD London and the Italian Language.

We are a multilingual expert company based in London. We can help you with your Italian language online and web marketing efforts, Seo, copy writing. If you need new content for your Italian website we would be glad to help your company to gain new clients. We have proven track of Italian language SEO success and adwords management.

The Benefits of Expanding Your Site to More Languages

Posted on October 17, 2013 by gabriele monti

How many people are you reaching with your website in the language it currently is in? Many business people create excellent websites and do a great deal of SEO so that they can get ranked by Google but they ignore one thing; that they should be reaching out to more people than just those who can read and understand English. Allowing translation on a website opens up a world of possibility in terms of the number of people you can get to buy from you. Imagine how much your sales would increase, if for example, the people in China and India could read and understand your website. The numbers are in the billions. Converting even a fraction of these would change the bottom line of your business. By not having what we can call international website content, you are seriously limiting the potential your business has to make you rich.

multiple languages will help your business – source

Another thing to take into account is that people generally like to be addressed in their own language. The sense of foreignness is dispelled. They are much more likely to open up to your message if they feel that you are one of them. And once they open up, you have every chance of converting them into prospects and even customers. It doesn’t matter that they may have a glimpse of English or even that they can read it and understand it very well. A millionaire in Nairobi who knows English and who is looking to buy something online will most likely look at the websites that are in his traditional Swahili language; it just feels a lot more familiar to him and familiarity breeds trust. Now, imagine that he is happy with the product or service and starts to talk about it with his other rich Nigerian friends; won’t they buy from you the next time they need it? It doesn’t cost much to have your website translated. There are many services that create multi-lingual content for websites, and they translate most of the world’s popular languages, at least the ones that are spoken by multitudes.

Translation buys you one other advantage; you may inadvertently discover entirely new niches that you would have missed entirely. A whole new group of people could discover you and start buying from you simply because they are looking for your product or service and your website is in a language that they can understand. You can then work on growing these new niches so that you can reach out to even more people. And remember, the number of people who speak English in the world are less than those who speak other tongues so the potential for your sales to exponentially increase among non-English speakers remains huge. Even cornering a small percentage of non-English speakers who consistently buy from you will see a big jump in sales.

To conclude, translation is worth the money and the time that you will put into it. Having multi-lingual doorways will open doors that you otherwise never have known existed.

Three Twitter Tips For Small Businesses

Posted on October 16, 2013 by gabriele monti

Small businesses really need a social media marketing strategy as much as large corporations need one. It may even be more important for a small business owner to take the time to get their name known on a large forum such as Twitter. This can seem like a huge undertaking but actually once you get going it’s quite easy to keep up with. There are a great many mistakes that small businesses can make to undo all the good their social media campaign offered the business. If you follow the tips below, you won’t make any mistakes and your Twitter will become a favorite with your followers.

Twitter might help your small business to find new clients – source

Keep it Real

You never want to lie or to offer anything that is not true on your Twitter feed because this produces a lack of trust between you and your followers. Just keep it real and tell it like it is to a certain degree. This doesn’t mean that you should use your business account as a platform for your personal opinions, you have a personal account for that, but when it comes to your company be honest. If you are asked for something that you cannot provide, rather than saying you can do it and then outsourcing the project for a profit, send your follower a link so they can do it on their own. This saves your customers’ money and they are more inclined to purchase from you at a later time.

Build Lasting Relationships with Customers

It is important to build lasting relationships with your customers so they want to continue following your business feed. For instance, if you own a restaurant and a customer tweets about how great the food was, retweet their post and thank them for it. You could go as far as to engage them in a conversation about what their meal was and what about it they liked the best. Offer them a small discount for posting about your company. You can also do this in the brick and mortar building. Any diner who tweets about your food automatically gets ten percent off their meal. This tactic works in any industry and builds a lasting rapport with your followers.

Never Spam Your Followers

Once of the gravest sins that a business can make is spamming their followers with a plethora of tweets intending to drive traffic to a website or brick and mortar store. Twitter should be a fun place where you customers and followers can find something of value out of your tweets. Even if they only get a laugh out of a tweet you made you are engaging, not spamming them. While you can certainly use Twitter to promote your company, there is a huge line drawn between what is considered spam and what is considered a good tweet. Learn it and know it if you want to keep your followers.

Small businesses everywhere are learning the benefits of having a good Twitter account where they can get real with their customers and build lasting relationships with them too. Just remember to keep the spam posts to a minimum or you may find your company no longer has a Twitter account because you’ve been reported. Nobody has time to fight a spam claim so just make sure that all your communications are top notch and you’ll do fine.

Samantha Murphy is a huge Twitter fan. When she’s not sharing her day with the Twitterverse, she also likes telling others how they can get more from Twitter via her articles.

Google Hummingbird Update – How Will it Affect You?

Posted on October 7, 2013 by gabriele monti

Google Hummingbird is a brand new algorithm in its search engine. It provides faster query results by focusing on the reason behind every query rather than the keyword. The meaning of the whole question is more important as opposed to the earlier single word search. The search results will be related to the whole question rather than the key words searchers are looking for.

Unlike Panda and Penguin updates, Hummingbird is not just an update but a complete new replacement. It is the first time Google has completely rewritten its algorithm.

google humming bird is the new algo updated affecting all searches – source

According to author of Google Semantic Search and an expert on search engine David Amerland

· Google has improved its ability to deal with complicated search queries.

· Secondly it has got much better at linking documents and search queries relationally

It is becoming more and more important to identify the actual intent behind a query for the SEO to remain successful. It is therefore necessary to identify the USP of any business and provide answers related to it.

Google has realized that search engines should be more about actual customer needs and less about keywords. So via Hummingbird it is looking for the purpose behind the query and offering a solution. This smarter algorithm compared to Penguin or Panda answers questions and filters answers and gives comparison data at a glance.

Hummingbird anticipates what information you will need. It simplifies complex search retrievals and improves data available via knowledge graph. This keeps users on their search page longer thus exposing them longer to sponsored ads. This improves ad sales and revenue for Google as well. It fulfills the dual purpose of increasing time on site and revenue by optimizing algorithm for artificial intelligence, semantic analysis and underlying understanding of language. It is focused on Natural Language Processing and better understands concepts versus words, relationships versus concepts.

But SEO specialists will have to watch, when it comes to local searches mobile devices, how successful Google will be. The primary goal is now to weed out useless irrelevant data from the search engine results page (SERP) and present only pages related to the core of the question asked. Business will have to get used to semantic search and knowledge graph. Hummingbird will have to position itself to be the correct source of answers users are seeking. It will have to identify intent, need and problems and then provide the answers and solutions.

Google will have to redefine their mobile search results page. According to them “It is cleaner, simpler, optimized for touch with results clustered on cards so you can focus on the answers you are looking for”. There has been a massive shift towards mobile search. The algorithm has to evolve to understand the longer more complex queries people ask on their mobiles.

Hummingbird therefore is looking at the meaning behind the entire query placed before the search engine. It has shifted the focus from individual keywords to the core meaning of the question asked by the user which will prove a challenge to any SEO agency not prepared for the change.

Hummingbird focuses on data retrieval, artificial intelligence and how data is accessed and presented to users to make his search a happier experience and this should be taken into account by all companies promoting a website.

Recent Search Engine Changes

Posted on October 4, 2013 by gabriele monti

It seems that every week these days, we receive a major new announcement from Google regarding either their algorithm or the way they share search data with users and companies. Of course, it now seems that Bing doesn’t want to be outdone, so the number of announcements coming out of Washington seem to be increasing as well. In reality, both companies continue to fight for their own respective shares of a search market, which according to a recent study by ComScore, is simply not growing. That whole not growing aspect to search is a major problem for both of these companies since they are publicly traded and as we all know, the stock market and investors want to see continued and sustainable growth over all times periods. That means both giant tech companies are likely to continue looking for ways to increase revenue from other sources over time.

Google Keyword Data is Gone:

As Rand said over at Moz, we’re officially living in a world now where your Google organic search traffic is going to coming over, 100% as keyword not provided. While Google itself is saying that the reasons are to restrict NSA data snooping and corporate snooping on their own end users, I do think that there are some real world reasons that Google might make the same change as well. For a small business owner, this makes it exceedingly difficult to tell what keywords are providing sales. Although it isn’t as crucial for those of us who exist in small enough verticals to have some idea about what’s truly going on by checking by hand, for huge corporations it makes it virtually impossible to track what’s working in regard to SEO. All that is to say simply, that if you want quality answers on what keywords are providing value, you are simply going to have to go back to paying for Pay Per Click advertisements to get some identifiable data in regard to the conversion rate of individual keywords.

Google keeps changing and improving the search algo – source

Google Continues to Identify Link Networks:

Over the weekend Google reportedly targeted and then took down another major link network, this one out of Russia. For those of us spending time creating quality sites with good content, I can’t stress how important this continual action happens to be. It simply isn’t fair for people to be playing by different sets of rules in rewards to the algorithms and how links are created. Nice job here guys.

Bing Offers Page Zero:

Bing in many ways is fighting Google in traditional ways, you know like the old Microsoft vs Google battles from a decade ago. One thing that I greatly appreciate about Bing these days is that they are beginning to offer auto suggestions in their search box, in much the same way that Google has for the past year or two. While the technology isn’t new necessarily, given the increasing lack of information coming from Google in regard to keyword volume, seeing any type of additional information from Bing is incredibly useful and valuable.

Major changes as usual right? Of course, it’s just another week in seach!

Mark Aselstine is the owner of Uncorked Ventures a wine club focused on delivering the best wine and value in the industry. Competing against major media backed wine clubs means Mark needs to continue improving his search engine marketing knowledge, since he can’t outmarket competitors like the New York Times!

What will content marketing be in the future?

Posted on October 2, 2013 by gabriele monti

Marketing is one of the main aspects of every business around the world. It is also one of the main factors that determine the success of a business. Today, we can clearly see content marketing becoming a more recognized aspect of the marketing strategy of many businesses around the world. So it is very important to prepare for the future of content marketing since it will help you in successfully facing the future changes and trends of the marketing world. Nowadays, almost every business has a huge number of competitors in the same industry, who are spread around the world. Since many of your competitors are probably already involved with content marketing, you must also try to focus on all the new trends of content marketing.

content for your website is one of the most important factor for SEO – image source

According to the current trends, it seems that longer blog posts are going to be a stronghold in the future of content marketing. The Internet we have today is greatly overloaded with sites that contain poor and useless content. So you need to focus on giving your customers complete, accurate and high-quality information. For this you will have to make detailed and a bit longer blog posts, which will include almost all the related information for a subject. There is no use of writing and publishing a post that includes about 2000 words but doesn’t contain the useful key details that customers want. If you try to increase the amount of words in an article by just adding blank words it will not only lead to bad lower search engine rankings, but will also lead to losing your customers. People who read a useless post are unlikely to even visit your website again. So it is time to put away the tiny content that you are used to have and turn into long posts with quality information that can attract more people.

The social media is also going to play a huge role in the future of content marketing world. As content marketing strategies continue to develop, they are likely to focus more on the social media and mobile. Marketers will come up with new tactics to bind their content with social media by combining their sites and blogs with social media. Making it easier for mobile users to view content is also going to be a major concern in the future. So making great content will not be enough in the future. To reach your goals with content marketing, you will also have to make your content more engaging with the readers.

Using visual effects for content marketing is also becoming popular. If you add high quality and interesting images to your blog-posts or articles, it will increase the readers’ attention. Use of images, infographics and posters are getting more and more popular every day. In fact, those have become a key piece in almost every blog today as contents marketing experts have pointed out that adding quality images to your content can increase its visibility by a significant amount. However, in order to make full use of visual impact, you need to maintain the quality of both images and content.

Author Bio : Sophie Taylor is an English writer who brings a level of realism to her work. Her work is her passion and she recently started her own Blog. She is currently writing articles about SEO Company.

UK Businesses That Benefit Most From Multilingual Websites

Posted on September 26, 2013 by gabriele monti

Even though English is still the most widely spoken language around the world, when it comes to making business online it is hard to underestimate the importance of hosting a multilingual website.

Trust is based on understanding – once the content is presented in the user’s native tongue, chances are high the visitor will choose to continue his or her activities within the particular website: sharing a post, booking a hotel or leaving a review about a product or service.

There are several businesses, which may be particularly affected by online multilingual presence.

Hotels and Tourist Attractions

A tourist searching for an accommodation in a foreign country will more likely use a website that contains information in his first language: it is way easier and faster to get a better view of hotel amenities, go over user ratings and evaluate the pricing options when all the details are presented in one’s native tongue. Tourist attraction websites that include descriptions of cultural and historical venues along with travelers’ comments are another niche that can benefit from multilingual display. These and other similar websites are usually visited by people from all around the world: therefore it is necessary for a tourist online business to be accessible in several commonly spoken languages.

Virtual Gambling and Casino

Virtual gambling and casinos is a multi-billion industry which has become extremely popular in the last few years. The laws and legislations related to gaming activities are fluctuating and varying from country to country, yet there are European and South American governments that allow, or at least not ban their citizens from playing remotely on foreign websites. Therefore, if you decide to launch an online casino in the UK, think about the potential market opportunities all around Europe and the rest of the world as well. Brazil and Uruguay, for example, have no regulations against virtual playing in overseas gambling clubs. Italian gaming authorities are currently in process trying to restrict its citizens from accessing out-of-the country websites; however, for the time being it is impossible to predict the outcome.

Considering that there are prospective visitors outside of the UK, a gaming website available in more than one language will inevitably increase your target group and, consequently, might expand your turnover.

online casinos need multilingual websites to operate – source

UK Company Formation and Business Help

If your website specializes in business consulting and legal advice such as UK company formation, your potential customers will benefit a lot more from being exposed to the information in their original language. Grasping legal documentation that is required for the creation of a new company in a different country can be quite challenging even in one’s mother tongue, not to speak about foreign language. Therefore, offering multilingual financial guidelines may significantly increase the number of your prospects and improve the conversion rate: people will more likely subscribe to your newsletter or send a quote request when they feel confident and understand every single word of your website content.

***

Online competition has never been easy. It is, therefore, vital to strive and provide the best user experience possible in terms of content and performance. Despite today’s availability of automatic translation software people find it more convenient to land on a website that already contains a version in their native tongue created by professionals and not a machine. The more language options you display the more attractive you become to different markets around the world. With so many websites offering similar products and services, your multilingual pages might be the key differentiator that will help you stand out. Eventually, it may determine the future of your website and the business overall.

How To Set Up A YouTube Channel To Improve Your SEO

Posted on September 25, 2013 by gabriele monti

Many businesses these days are looking for something that will give them an edge over their competitors, without it costing the earth. Everyone is aware of SEO and how it can affect their business (both good and bad) and it makes sense to try to seek out the best tools and techniques available. One fairly cheap, yet highly effective, method is to have your own YouTube channel. Every video you produce and add to your channel is tagged and indexed, which in turn will help your website show up in search engine results.

youtube is a great tool for digital marketing.

Choose Your Topic Carefully

Let’s be honest, some businesses are inherently boring and nobody would sit for long watching a video about them. Therefore, try to make your video as interesting as possible, use a different slant or perspective and give the video some personality (without forgetting why you are there or what it is that you are actually selling). Funny, light-hearted videos always go down very well, so try to think of a way of incorporating some light-heartedness. If you have your own business or website, it is highly likely that you are skilled at something. Show off that expertise, but in a way that is easy to watch. For example, if you are an artist, film yourself painting, explaining what brushes you should choose, offering little tips as you paint. You need to build up a rapport with your audience and the more you are able to do that, the more viewers you will get, which in turn will improve your SEO.

Making the Videos

There are two ways to go about doing this, either go the cost-effective way and do it yourself or hire a professional. Be wary of hiring a professional, though – not only because of the additional costs, but because professional videos can look, well, too professional. A big part of the appeal of YouTube videos is that people seem real and approachable, and you will lose that if you pay too much attention to detail. These days, video and camera equipment is reasonably priced and there is a great amount of software for producing videos available, so going it alone seems like the most suitable way forward.

Uploading

After uploading a video, you will need to think about the following ways to maximize SEO:

Tagging: when tagging your video, do not go overboard and try to keep the amount of tags between 5-10. Think very careful about the words you are going to use and make sure they are pertinent and relevant, focusing on what the video is about. Good words to use when tagging are things like brand, product or model names
Title: make sure that every video you upload has its own unique title – you should never use the same title twice.
Description: always include a link back to your website and then build a paragraph using keywords and phrases, remembering to use words that will clarify to the viewer what the video is about.

Google Rankings

Videos usually receive a higher ranking in search engines, but videos posted on YouTube in particular will get a higher ranking with Google, so this advantage will immediately improve your SEO. Other factors that will play a part in where your video ranks are:

Number of subscribers to your channel
How often you upload new videos
How your video is rated by viewers (thumbs up/down)

Zane Schwarzlose is an SEO at Fahrenheit Marketing, an Austin website design company. Zane enjoys using video in his SEO campaigns.

Online Reputation Management For Medical Practices

Posted on September 25, 2013 by gabriele monti

Reputation has a direct correlation to the success of your medical practice and the number of patients you’ll have flowing in and out of your office. This is nothing new to the business world, but as online reputations are gaining more and more importance in today’s internet-obsessed world, it’s worth taking another look at.

Today, many people rely on internet searches to find health care providers, and a large majority of those potential patients will be easily swayed to and from medical practices by positive and negative reviews. Creating a good online reputation takes a large investment in time and energy, but with the growing emphasis on online reviews and ratings, it is ultimately worth it.

Potential patients that search for you on the internet will be immediately impacted by their results. If you don’t have an online presence at all, they will consider your practice not quite legitimate and unprofessional. A simple star rating, put into comparison with other medical professionals’ online ratings, could quickly and simply determine whether or not your practice is even up for consideration. Here are some basic tips for managing your online reputation to give the best impressions to potential patients online.

Medial practices need to manage their online reputation – source

1. Confidentiality

This is probably the most important thing to consider when interacting with patients online, since confidentiality violations have some of the most serious consequences out of anything that could hurt you online. Review your HIPAA agreements, and, as a general rule, never share anything specific or personal about their information or procedures.

2. Take emotions out of your responses.

It hurts to read negative reviews, whether they’re true or not. And, unfortunately, it is impossible that 100% of your patients will have a 100% positive experience at your practice 100% of the time. Everyone gets negative reviews, and that fact actually makes your profile seem more credible when you have some negative reviews compared to if all of your reviews are raving about your brilliance. Before responding to a review, give yourself a day or two to make sure that emotions are filtered out of it. You want to respond as civilly and professionally as possible.

3. Respond Wisely

It doesn’t need to be said that it is important to respond and reply to reviews, both positive and negative. This gives you a chance to show gratitude to those who are promoting you and an explanation to those who haven’t had a good experience. However, remember that you won’t be able to please everyone. Do not get involved in extensive arguments online, pointing fingers and slanting insults; this makes you look childish, and while your accuser may not have much to lose by continuing this flame war, you do. Beyond one or two responses at most, let the issue go, and if you can identify the patient, just give them a call to discuss it in a more private and personal manner.

4. Ask your patients for feedback.

Actively encourage your patients to post feedback online. The type of patient most likely to take their own initiative to take the time to post a review online is one that had a negative experience. However, by encouraging your patients to post reviews will boost the number of positive reviews and thus balance out the overall perception of your practice.

Olivia Lin writes for Austin Oral Surgery, an oral surgery clinic always looking to maintain its reputation.

The Advantages of Accepting Bitcoins for Your e-Commerce

Posted on September 21, 2013 by gabriele monti

Bitcoin is a new form of money: the first electronic currency, which does not depend on any central authority such as the bank or the government. Started as an open source project in 2009, it has become the most accepted virtual currency in the world. The premium value of bitcoins lays in the combination of its monetary use and encrypted protocol which enables quick and secure peer-to-peer online transactions.
Bitcoins can be acquired for any existing currency like dollars, euros, yens etc., yet its exchange rate is not fixed and tends to fluctuate based on supply and demand. Still, due to its complete transparency and ease of use merchants and clients commonly choose to work with this digital cash for exchanging goods and services.
Here are a few outstanding benefits for merchants who accept bitcoins as a form of payment.

bitcoins are at the moment the most successful crypto currency available – source

Instant payments, no need for a merchant account, very low fees

Bitcoins can be transferred directly from person to person via internet avoiding the intervention of any third party such as the bank or a credit card company. This significantly reduces transaction fees and administrative costs. Most payments can be handled without extra charges or for a negligently low sum worth of several pennies. These fees are charged primarily to prevent users from overloading the network by sending many low-amount transactions. The money is drawn from a user’s digital wallet – an application installed on a PC or a smartphone.

Client Protection: No Personal Information Revealed

Customers who choose to pay in bitcoins are not enforced to reveal their personal information such as credit card number or a street address. Biton guarantees a high level of anonymousness, which has enormous benefits for the buyer such as protection against identity theft. Another advantage is customer security from unnoticed, hidden charges, which are made possible when using traditional forms of online payment. With bitcoins no sensitive information is tied to the transaction which enables a totally secure financial processing.

Low Risk for Merchants: Irreversible Transactions, No Fraudulent Chargebacks.

One of the biggest advantages for merchants accepting bitcoins is that transactions are secure and irreversible for both sides. Unlike with credit cards or online banking networks, paying in bitcoins does not allow buyers claim their money back, which prevents unpleasant issues, such as fraudulent chargebacks, from happening. Once the payment has been made the merchant can safely ship the product or provide the service avoiding the risk of not getting paid. Merchants can easily move into other competitive markets where credit cards cannot be used or fraud rates are unacceptably high.
***
With over 100,000 users around the world, bitcoin is the most popular digital money with a growing consumer base. This peer-to-peer payment network is beneficial for merchants and buyers as one for the possibility of processing quick and secure transactions. Since the system is not controlled by a single authority but by all its users around the world, no one is empowered to manipulate it for personal interests. This unique combination of security, convenience and transparency makes Bitcoin what it is today: the most successful decentralized financial system.