Globalization in Site Design, Content and Development

Globalization has become a hot topic in the last decade. What are the best SEO practices for reaching such a large audience? How much do companies have to spend to make their sites international? Is simply translating the language enough?

According to “Is Your SEO Strategy Global?” by John Tawadros,

Optimizing your site for just one country might create more challenges in the long run. Ultimately, when you eventually begin thinking about a global strategy, it may even cause you to go back and change what you’ve changed once already.

There are a lot of articles about general practices for SEO and patching recommendations. Today, I’ll concentrate more on the design and content aspects of globalization, especially in relation to healthcare marketing.

Imagery

When designing sites in the U.S., we tend to gear images towards a North American audience. When doing a stock photo search with the keyword “happy,” images of typical American ideals and pastimes pop up: anything from smiling families cheering at a baseball game to hugging couples walking under Christmas lights. But what if your audience is Japanese or Brazilian? Choose your cultural reference points carefully.

Dell uses appropriate imagery for Chinese New Year on their Chinese site.

While looks, clothes and pastimes vary from country to country, cultural taboos and superstitions can also influence image choice. For example, in most places in the world, white flowers bring thoughts of innocence, humility and beauty; in China and Taiwan, white symbolizes death and is only used in funerals. Imagine the offense if an international cancer care site used white roses in the background!

Be sensitive to the ethnicity of the people in imagery: don’t use a family from country A in country B’s banner if B has resentments towards A from a past war. Keep in mind a country’s gender barriers; in areas in the world that have strong beliefs in keeping healthcare gender-appropriate, be careful to choose an image with a female doctor treating a female patient.

Usability

User experience is difficult to tackle with any site. In global sites, language flow will impact usability. Not all languages are read from left to right (although Chinese and Japanese can be either), and both Arabic and Hebrew are referred to as bidirectional (i.e., text is written from right to left, but numbers are written the same way as left-to-right languages).

Different languages also take up different amounts of space. Character-based languages like Chinese or Japanese take up considerably more space than English. Sites must be able to expand and shrink accordingly. Make smart choices about grids and placement of images.

Samsung has one of my favorite country selector choices with the flag, country name and language.

The country selector is another crucial usability decision. Smaller companies send all users to the U.S. home page and use a top-nav selector. Large companies, meanwhile, use an interstitial country selector page and cookie user locations. Technology giants such as Dell, Apple and Samsung use better SEO practices and country-correct domains to send audiences directly to country-specific pages.

And don’t forget technology! Some areas don’t have the same access to the most recent browser updates. The general population might be running on Internet Explorer 6, where a cool Flash animation may not work.

Content

Content/language is seemingly the “easy” part of globalization. Just send to a translating service to get the job done, right?

While this idea may work for basic pages with general information, it breaks down at the campaign level when American idioms are used to make catchy and memorable slogans. Every culture has its own lingo and humor, and sometimes, the wittiness of the headline has to be sacrificed to succeed globally. Adam Wooten gives a great example on airline marketing:

In 1987, Braniff Airlines ran ads on television, on radio and in newspapers flaunting the fact that its jets were equipped with all-leather seats. Spanish-language radio ads in the Florida market were the first to reveal an unintended double entendre. Braniff had translated its “fly in leather” slogan as fly “en cuero,” which sounds like Spanish slang for “fly naked.”

Conclusion

Globalization is key to building an international presence. Giants such as Dell and Apple are aware of these guidelines; these companies are big enough that they can globalize on a local level within each country (e.g., LATAM websites are designed and translated in LATAM based on a global ideal). Regardless of size, all sites should be aware of globalization. Due diligence and research should be part of the development of each site.

Johnson & Johnson/Acuvue: The Filipino site (above) is very different from the Dutch one (below), but both are appropriate for their countries. In this case, the Dutch site is running a template that many other countries are using. Click on the image to be taken to the site.

For more tips and information, the wondrous interwebs has some useful resources:

Acclaro
A service for translating global business, Acclaro has a really great blog about the interesting challenges they’ve experienced, as well as great tips for localizing.

Stick Out Your Tongues — Speaking the Language of International Healthcare
Click here for a more detailed analysis of SEO and language translations in globalization from Medical Tourism Magazine.

W3
The always-splendid W3 has standards and best practices for handling right-to-left content in XHTML and HTML (hint: there’s an attribute that can be tied with CSS for it!).

The Web Globalization Report Card
Best of 2011! Facebook, Google and Cisco are consistently at the top.