Lesson 48: Do we use right words on our websites to offer translation services? Part 2: Translators

What makes clients chose one agency over another? What makes them go to an agency in the first place? We’re all wondering about that and we’re trying to find our own marketing advantages. Competing with giants is much easier on the internet. You get yourself a website, spice it up with custom-made design and write some texts. Yes, I’m going to talk about texts agencies and freelance translators use on their websites. I’m not interested in SEO, because it’s for the crawlers. I just want to have a look at words that people read. What if that is our secret weapon?

In the last post I had a look at agency websites. This week I repeated the experiment, concentrating on websites owned by freelance translators in different languages. I created a smaller corpus, consisting of 3,500 words taken from home pages of 13 websites. I used Word Counter again to analyse the words we use. Then I tested a few most popular freelance websites to see what the most used words on them were.

We all translate…

“Translation” popped up 61 times. But – surprise surprise – “translator” appeared 42 times. It means that freelancers identify themselves as professionals more than providers of translation services. Speaking of which, “service” was on the third place with 24 appearances.

It’s all about me.

When I checked the corpus against grammatical words as well, it turned out that the most popular personal pronoun was “I” (70 repetitions) and “my” (58 repetitions). The results are quite understandable, since we’re all freelancers. But according to the golden rule of marketing, our advertising (including web copy) should be for them (clients) not about us (providers). “You” appeared only 30 times.

How do we describe our services?

“Professional” was used 18 times. “Freelance” popped out 11 times. “Experienced” was used 11 times. And that’s about it. I’d have expected us to do a bit better…

How to do it well…

I checked some websites that are popular both with people and search engines. Look at that:

So many keywords related to our industry!

It turns out that the most relevant keywords are: translation, needs, business, projects. I also looked at some websites that weren’t appealing either to me or to search engines. The checker found that lower ranking websites use grammatical words much more frequently than content words. One website that I looked at had 12 grammatical words before “translation” even appeared. Certainly something worth working on…

In the next post, I’ll talk about my conclusions. I’ll also try to find some tools to help us improve our web copies.

Marta Stelmaszak

Polski - English - Français translator and interpreter with 6 years of experience, specialising in law, IT, marketing, and business. A member of the Management Committee of the Interpreting Division at the Chartered Institute of Linguists and a Top 25 Twitterer (@mstelmaszak) and Top 25 Facebook Fan Page in Language Lovers 2012.

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You may also want to learn:

• Lesson 49: Do we use right words on our websites? Part 3: Copywriting tips for translators
• Lesson 46: 10 things a freelance translator should do at least once to be noticed
• Lesson 45: Slides and handouts on online marketing and social media for translators
• Lesson 44: Translators, do you know how to network?
• Lesson 43: Give me your business card…