Speak Your Language
At the risk of offending thousands of people, I’m going to say something that’s been on my mind for a while:
Don’t write your business website in a language you’re not fluent in.
I’m sure you’ve seen them as much as I have. There are thousands of blogs and websites that are written in sub par English. Worst of all, a good percentage of these are business websites.
Let me get one thing out in the open before I continue. When it comes to being bilingual, I fit the American mold: I can’t speak a word of any other language and I have a hard enough time with English (as you can tell from my writing). I have the utmost respect for people who do take the time to learn different languages and I don’t judge people on their ability to speak the only language I happen to know.
However, when you create a business-oriented website in a language you’re not that familiar with you begin to alienate much of your audience.
For instance, the other day I was clicking around some trackbacks and came across an SEO blog written in mangled English. The author touted himself as one of the few SEO experts in Pakistan.
Even though the author’s English was infinitely better than my Urdu, the only readers he can hope to attract are those that have the EXACT same understanding of the English language as the author.
Here’s why:
Everyone who has less of a command of the English language is going to get confused by the blog and probably won’t want to read much of it. Everyone who speaks fluent English is going to be turned off by the grammar mistakes.
The author has inadvertantly limited his audience to everyone who makes the same mistakes he does; in other words, the only audience will be the author himself.
My point is not, “learn English or your business will suffer.” Instead, I suggest people create their websites in their native language. Not only will it appear more professional, but you’ll have a better chance of obtaining and pleasing clients that you can communicate with.
Who would you rather be: the 1,000,000th best English-speaking SEO firm or the #1 SEO firm in Pakistan?
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You really got the point! I’m not a native speaker too. So I think I understand now why no one reads my blog :\
[…] selling hosting in your language. I actually wrote a post about this a while back. Check it out: Speak Your Language Good luck. __________________ WageRank.com More Keywords = More Traffic = More […]
This is a good point, but what about countries where be the number one seo means nothing? why be number one if you can’t sell your services? It’s my case in my country. The companies don’t know what seo is and they don’t want to know!