This is a guest post by Mark Hemming

Introduction

If you’ve made the decision to branch out from portal profiles and create your own personal translator website, you’ve make a smart move to stand out from the crowd and reach a wider range of potential clients, so congratulations!

However, many translator sites receive an absolute minimum of visitors, so how do you make sure your site is being viewed by the right people and not just attracting digital dust? The good news is that just a few simple tweaks can increase your site’s exposure and help you to increase the number of new clients that you take on, so let’s start our overview on site improvement with tip number one.

1. Learn about local Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

You may well have come across the topic of SEO before, which is essentially the process tweaking your site so that your page ranks higher on Google. The easiest way to improve your site’s visibility is to target keywords specific to your local area such as “Interpreter in Manchester” or “German translator in Brighton”, which you should ideally place in a page title.

Targeting your local area works well as it essentially cuts out competitors in other areas of your country, and an added bonus is that some businesses might be more likely to want to work with a translator in the vicinity, particularly for in-house work.

Most local SEO is based on the concept of Google recognising your brand, and one additional quick fix to boost your search engine rankings locally is to embed your Google Maps location in your site, which leads Google to trust your location a little more and will therefore improve your position in results.

A great deal of help and advice is available online when it comes to learning SEO, and dedicated Facebook groups are a good place to start, as you can ask questions and get valuable tips from others. As an alternative, if you have the budget, hiring a dedicate freelancer or agency to handle your site’s SEO could reap rewards for you and save time.

2. Use Google My Business

Following on from the importance of local SEO above, using Google My Business is a really good tool to let clients in your local area find you. You can set up a profile in minutes, and your business will appear at the top of Google’s search results in the GMB bar. One of the really useful advantages of GMB is that it will prioritise your page in search results based on site keywords (see the result for “certified translation” below). You’re likely to get especially good results with GMB if your business address is in the centre of a city, and positive reviews from customers will also boost your standings.

3. Find an audience for your blog posts

Blogging can be an effective way of answering prospective clients’ questions as well as providing language-based resources that are either helpful for other translators or just an interesting read for web users in general.

However, the majority of blog posts receive woefully low numbers of views. To combat this, you need to find an audience for your articles. Sites such as Reddit are a great solution for this – as an example one of my posts on Russian vocabulary received over 400 views in a day after submission to the r/Russian community. The site is full of users grouped by interest, with subdivisions for just about any language or subject you can imagine, which makes it a great place for sharing your material and gaining exposure.

Although increasing traffic to your website might not result in an instant increase in enquiries, targeted traffic will improve your search engine results and raise awareness around your personal brand.

4. Make time for a site redesign

Translator websites range from stunningly designed masterpieces to pages that transport you back to the year 2000, so it’s time to make sure yours is in the first category!  If your site is more than a couple of years old, it’s probably not well optimised for mobile use and could do with an update.

Revamping your site might seem like a gargantuan task, but the rewards you’ll reap in terms of client impressions will be more than worth the effort. Many web hosting companies now offer easy-to-use site building tools that are inexpensive or free, or alternatively WordPress templates make it easy to create an extremely professional-looking site without too much technical knowledge required.

Conclusion

Implementing any of the steps above will provide a welcome boost to your site, and setting aside time to deepen your knowledge about any of the topics above will give you a significant return over time, so why not consider dedicating an hour a week to website enhancement?

Note from Tess: If you want help with optimizing your website, LinkedIn profile and using content marketing to attract your ideal clients to you online, you might be interested in this new, on-demand course: Inbound Marketing for Translators and Interpreters – How to transform your website and online presence into client-generating machines. Check it out here!

Mark Hemming runs Libra Translation in Liverpool, UK and is passionate about both digital marketing and all things related to legal translation. He translates from French, Russian and Slovenian into English specializing in legal and contract translation. When not translating, he can usually be found taking a long walk on the beach or doing the occasional spot of rock climbing. Mark provides translation services through Libra Translation in Liverpool, UK.