What are the best practices and standards for content localization in your industry or niche?

1 Assess your localization needs

Before you start localizing your content, you need to assess your localization needs and goals. This involves identifying your target markets, segments, and personas, and researching their linguistic, cultural, and behavioral characteristics. You also need to evaluate your existing content assets, and determine which ones are relevant, reusable, or adaptable for each market. Finally, you need to define your localization budget, timeline, and quality standards, and choose the best tools and partners to support your localization efforts.

2 Follow the localization best practices

Once you have established your localization needs and goals, you should adhere to some general best practices that are applicable to any industry or niche. This includes creating a consistent style guide and glossary for accuracy and clarity, employing a professional translator or native speaker with subject matter expertise, leveraging a localization management platform or content management system for multilingual content creation, storage, and delivery, testing and reviewing localized content before publishing or launching it, and obtaining feedback from local audiences or experts. Additionally, it is important to monitor and measure your localization performance and impact, so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

3 Adapt your content to the local context

When creating content, it is essential to consider the linguistic, cultural, and functional aspects of the content in order to reach the desired audience. This requires adapting the content to the specific context of each market or segment. For instance, one must use the appropriate language variant, dialect, spelling, grammar, punctuation, and format for each market or segment. Additionally, the tone, voice, humor, idioms, metaphors and references should be tailored to each market or segment. Furthermore, images, colors, symbols, icons and graphics should be selected based on the market or segment. Moreover, units, currencies, dates and times must be adapted according to the market or segment. Lastly, layout design navigation and functionality should be adjusted for each market or segment.

4 Optimize your content for local SEO

Content localization is an important aspect of SEO, as it ensures that your content is visible, relevant, and engaging for local audiences and search engines. To optimize your content, you need to use the appropriate keywords, phrases, and tags for each market or segment. Additionally, you should consider the domain, subdomain, subdirectory, or URL structure for each market or segment. Furthermore, meta tags, headings, titles, descriptions, and alt texts should be tailored to each market or segment. Moreover, schema markup and rich snippets should be used for each market or segment. Finally, links and backlinks should also be optimized for each market or segment.

5 Update and maintain your localized content

Finally, you need to stay on top of your localized content by regularly updating and maintaining it. This means tracking any changes, updates, or feedback on the original content and applying them to the localized versions. It also requires monitoring changes, trends, or opportunities in your local markets or segments, and adapting the content accordingly. To do this, you should consider using a content audit or inventory to identify any outdated, inaccurate, or irrelevant content and update or remove it accordingly. You can also use a content calendar or workflow to plan and execute any new or updated content and align it with your localization goals and resources. Additionally, you can use a content analysis or evaluation to measure the effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of your localized content and identify any gaps, issues, or improvements. Finally, you can use a content feedback or review system to collect comments, ratings, reviews, or suggestions from your local audience or experts and incorporate them into your content.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?