British businesses must invest in multiple language websites if they want to ride the wave of non-English searches
Firms are missing out on sales by failing to grasp the growth in the foreign language internet, a leading translation company has said.
Fierce competition for key English language advertising search terms and natural query results means that businesses should be smarter about how they make themselves known to overseas customers.
While up to 80pc of the web’s content is in English, the growth in number of searches is coming from those using foreign languages. Over half of all Google searches are now in a language other than English.
Searches in Arabic have jumped 2,502pc in the last decade, Russian by 1,826pc, Chinese by 1,277pc and Portuguese by 990pc, reflecting Brazil’s rise. These growth rates compare with a more pedestrian 281pc for English.
Investment bank JP Morgan predicts that US search growth will be 12pc this year but international queries up 19pc. It is forecasting that paid search revenues outside the US will rocket 25pc to $25.7bn this year.