Exporting fairtrade toys and other ranges.

Have I told you that we are trying to increase our exports? As a way of compensating you for listening to me going on and on about our attempts to increase sales of our fair trade soft toys in Europe I want to share the notes from the recent course I went on.

The course which was led by a consultant from www.growglobal.co.uk who was very impressive

There were a couple of key facts which stuck with me

• Customers are 4x more likely to buy from a website which is in their own language

• Visitors stay twice as long on a website if its in their own language (NB this does not include google translated websites)

• 85% of business procurement starts online

• 70% of online searches are not in English

Given that the decision is made about your website within 3 seconds of the potential customer clicking on it the first thing is to make sure people know that your business is not country specific, ie use words such as International, Worldwide or Global in the title line.

As google becomes more regionalised most search results show only results from companies registered in that country, so if you search for fair trade soft toys in google.uk Best Years are shown but not if you search in google.fr.

In order to show up on search engines you either need to have a page in the applicable language which can be picked up and listed by google in the relevant country or, if you have a domain name which ends in .com or .eu you can ask google to list you on their other search engines (geo-targeting).

We have started this process and have a page in Swedish linked off our homepage and now searches to our website from Sweden are the 3rd most comman after UK and USA.

The more content you have in a language the more weight you will have in the search rankings, so translating any relevant content in to different languages is very powerful. Also if you show partners or case studies from countries other than the UK. We really need to set up our products with descriptions in other languages besides English

Meta tags should not be set up in English for these pages!

If you get serious about increasing your visibility in other countries then you should do key word analysis of your competitors in the country and incorporate them in to the translated pages although this will be a lot of work!

I really felt after the course that you can do as much or as little as you have time to do but everything you do has the opportunity to open up new markets for you.

We are now going to have an Export Communications Review done on our website courtesy of www.ukti.org and we will let you know if this is a useful investment