The web does not just connect machines, it connects people! Tim Berners-Lee

Your website is your company’s DISPLAY WINDOW for the world! The difference here though is that the prospective client has to read through your content to get to know more about you and your offerings!

Imagine you enter a shop after being attracted by its display window and the salesman starts talking to you in a foreign language that you can’t make any sense of .. will you stay for long in this shop, let alone buy anything from there?

This is exactly what happens to people for whom English is not the first language and who reach your English-only website. They will just move ahead to another website that they “understand and can relate to” and forget about your company and products/services.

According to latest research for 2017 released by Internet World Users by Language , English speakers account for only 25.5% of the total internet users in the world. So your English-only website can reach just a quarter of the world’s internet users! Chinese speakers come to a close 20.4% and they are concentrated mostly in China.

But what about languages like Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, French, German and Russian? Together they account for 27.5% of total internet users in the world!

A recent online study of Top languages for E-commerce for 2020 predicts a rapid decline of English on the internet. In 2020, English will account for only 33.1% of the global purchasing power, but others presently considered as minority languages like Turkish, Indonesian and Farsi will emerge with rising market shares.

So in this world with a narrowing digital language divide, how will your website fare? Are you going to be able to woo the millions of non-English speakers out there? Can you make your sales pitch in their language? Can your product brochure written in Arabic fetch you more clients from the Middle East??

As Nelson Mandela has famously said:

"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart".

So will your website be able to strike a chord in your prospect’s heart?

This topic will be continued in our next blog in the upcoming month!