Getting Lost In Online Translation: What Do People Mean By 'Translation Service'?

For many small service businesses, the web has provided a great opportunity to seek out niches missed by the big boys. With many larger companies slow to appreciate the Internet's potential for delivering customers who actually want to buy a product or service, smaller, nimbler operators have prospered. After all, people can qualify themselves very effectively as prospective buyers through the words and phrases they type into a search engine, and once you know which ones your customers are likely to use, you can use pay-per-click campaigns and improving your rankings in the 'natural results' to generate real-world business. This is quite a complicated matter, however; not only is it difficult to measure exactly the value of visitors using a certain term; it may also be costly to deal with all the non revenue-generating traffic your high profile in the search engines produces.

One of the most competitive terms in our industry - the translation industry - is, unsurprisingly, 'translation service'. This term says what our company does, and would seem to be relatively unambiguous. But I'd say at least 95% of the people who type this into a search engine and come to our own site don't quite fit the profile of prospective client we're wanting to attract - and many don't even want a translation service. I'll try to explain why this might be. click for more info online fordító

The largest category, perhaps 40%, would be translators. Freelance translators are always on the look-out for translation agencies with the potential to offer them a good, regular flow of work. It makes perfect sense that they should use the same techniques as prospective clients to find their own clients. It's just a shame for person in charge of marketing who wonders why the rates of conversion for supposedly golden key phrases are not quite as good as they should be. (Of course translation companies do need qualified professional translators, so this is not an entirely negative phenomenon - just one that doesn't fit in with most translation companies' marketing plans).

The next significant category - quite possibly as many as 25% of visitors on the term translation service - would be students. Languages students may be investigating the various different players on the market for much the same reason - they want to see what job prospects there might be for them when they graduate. Business students may be looking for work experience, or for case studies of businesses they can use as part of their studies. Students of computer science may be investigating the technologies used to localise software or maintain multi-lingual websites effectively. All of these are, of course, perfectly justified, but they're eating away at our marketing manager's budgets without even knowing about it.

Another very significant category - quite possibly a sixth of all searches - will be those who would never consider paying for a translation service. They may not have been so considerate as to have typed in 'free' before the 'translation service' part, but that doesn't mean they don't expect something for nothing. One of the main reasons the Internet has become such a popular place to look for products and services is that people expect to find things cheaper than they could elsewhere - and sometimes even for free! Indeed, when you make the search described, you can see the top results are often tools like Free Translation and Altavista's Babelfish - more like dictionary look-up services than translation services.

There are also quite a few people who consider interpreting to be a translation service and those who might be looking for a data translation service to be factored in. And many of those who do, indeed, want a translation service might be looking for one delivered in their specific corner of a country, or they might want a specific additional service - notarisation, for example - which is difficult to cater for in all countries.

All the above to illustrate two things: firstly, that people can mean very different things when they ask search engines for a translation service. Secondly, that the holy grail of traffic from the web can be a profitable way for small businesses to gain business - but it can also generate a whole load of interest from people you might not have thought would type in that term.