Serving your customers is important. In the big scheme of things, it’s one of the most important factors that will determine your success. And while most people think they know where their customers come from, they are often surprised to learn how many “international” visitors their site gets. In some cases, businesses even make statements such as “65% of my visitors are from <insert country here> and I only focus on them…”
This is a recipe for disaster, as you may easily miss a growing trend that could have a positive impact on your business.
And just offering stand-alone translation services is nothing new. In fact, the Microsoft Translator was a leader early on by offering the ability for your visitors to offer refinements and feedback on the provided translations. This could be an advantage with a growing visitor base in many areas where personal connections and relationships matter a great deal in business.
Today, however, it’s easier than ever to serve almost everyone who visits your website. Being able to allow a visitor to translate your content into their language of choice can pay dividends in terms of sales, traffic, links, sharing and ultimately, even impact rankings.
Previously, you had access to both the Bing Translator and the Microsoft Translator widgets, which offered some limited customization and an excellent translation service. Bing Webmaster Tools is now an integral part of this great self-help service. The Bing Translator widget has been revised, improved and is now in a consolidated location fully ready to serve your translation needs.
From one location, now, you can access any easy to work with, simple to install, robust and reliable translation widget. Install this on your site and allow any visitor to select a language of their choosing to view your content.
One very useful feature is the ability to enable community management of translations. By turning this on, you can approve/reject translations, and invite others you trust to help with moderating. You can also launch the webmaster translation dashboard, from where you can invite friends or translators or moderate the translations in bulk.
This is an excellent way to help get clearer input from your own community of visitors, and directly from experts in a given language.
If you visit our main help section and originate from a location/language other than English, you’ll see the widget embedded in the lower left, ready to translate the content on the page into English for you. You’ll still see the widget embedded if you visit already configured to view English, but there is no translation needed, obviously.