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Amazon listing translation: are your translated product listings optimised?
In 2023, for any seller expanding internationally, Amazon is the first port of call. However, in an era where customers expect instant results, sellers want the same. As such, a seller tends to first translate Amazon listings for free, via use of Google Translate or similar machine translation services. Categorically, this is a mistake which will have damaging and lasting consequences on sales. Keep reading to learn why!
Why you need natively translated Amazon product listings
Pause for a moment and consider these two statistics:
- Amazon currently has over 350 million product listings.
- In a global consumer survey, 40% will never buy from websites in other languages.
Mix these ingredients and what’s the recipe? It’s buy native! Competition for products and listings on Amazon is fierce, compounded by increasing customer mistrust of content that is not in their mother tongue. If you make your listing native, you boost your competitiveness. Why?
- Natives understand nuances such as irony, humour, and cultural references/taboos.
- Natives know the latest linguistic trends, which is especially important for spoken language (think ‘Alexa’ and optimising voice searches – an important future trend for ecommerce!).
- Natives use the best, idiomatic keyword translations, understand semantically linked words, and can quickly remove irrelevant keywords.
By deploying a native Amazon listing translation strategy, a seller embraces the process known to uptimaz as localisation.
Amazon listing translation: practise localisation to level up performance
Translating Amazon listings is no mean feat. To succeed in a global marketplace, sellers need localisation know-how for their services to reflect fast-changing customer habits. The latter are influenced by contextual nuances, which are driven by cognitive and emotional behaviour. While in-context factors are key to localisation because they are culture-specific, this phenomenon is like double Dutch to machine translation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools.
Localisation is a human solution to drive competitiveness and will help the seller to stay ahead of the pack. But don’t forget, Amazon is essentially an ecommerce platform, and the standards of the ecommerce industry are rapidly shifting. That’s where optimisation comes into play!
Amazon listing translation: leverage optimisation to maximise performance
Optimisation makes or breaks your ecommerce strategy. This process refers to best-in-class SEO copywriting and to translate Amazon listings, the name of the game is keyword, keyword, keyword! We said it once and we’ll say it again: yes, you need native translations to remain competitive, but you also need SEO expertise to stay relevant.
Simply put, localisation fosters competitiveness while optimisation is a search engine solution to guarantee relevance. Concretely, Amazon listing optimisation is achieved through strategically crafted short tail, long tail and backend keywords which mirror customers’ research practices as well as the search patterns of the Amazon A9 Algorithm. Still with us? Time for some examples!
How to localise and optimise Amazon listing translations
Localising Amazon product listings involves multiple (inter-)cultural concepts. An important example is the five-bullet point section of the Amazon product description. Any product sold to European customers should use at least three bullet points to outline technical benefits with a tone of voice that is objective.
German consumers require four bullet points of technical specifications (including quantified metrics, so metres for Germans vs. feet for English speakers!). The same applied to British audiences, but “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. Post-Brexit, Amazon UK product listings align more with Amazon US. Instead, three to four bullet points state a brand’s goals and values, in a subjective style that will don a turbocharged positive message, e.g., “We’re proud to be the best (…) order today!”. A similar parallel can be drawn with Mexican Spanish which also prefers more direct marketing language (“Compra hoy/¡Cómpralo ya!”) versus the neutral tone used for Castilian Spanish, avoiding such renderings altogether.
To localise Amazon listings, another salient feature is the subtlety between variants of the same language. In English, translating Amazon content can be a headache since an American needs time and help understanding a “sustainable dummy” just as your Brit would struggle with the idea of an “eco-friendly pacifier”. The same principle goes for Spanish, where your Amazon listing may prioritise “cargador eléctrico del coche” for Spaniards, but “cargador eléctrico del carro” for buyers in Ecuador.
In essence, optimising Amazon product listings centres on two techniques. First, nailing those culture-specific long tail keywords. For Brits, this means a search for “organic cotton unisex baby rompers” compared to Americans’ “organic cotton gender neutral baby onesies”. Second is that small task of copywriting… all the more important given how much English copy is functional and poorly written! One example is the standard English phrase “No assembly required” which in French could be optimised to “Pas de montage fastidieux”.
Admittedly, these two processes will help to boost traffic. But we’ll let you in on a little secret: you can take your Amazon listing translation to the next level if you uptimaz! 😉
Scaling up Amazon product listings through uptimaz
To translate Amazon listings, uptimaz provides a seller with two competitive advantages. Number one is our Reverse ASIN search method. This lets us unearth every single one of your competitors’ top-ranking keywords, an approach bolstered by the specific native expertise of our uptimaz-ers. For instance, if your content requires Argentinian Spanish, we’ll tailor our service to words exclusive to Argentina while ironing out any other variants of Spanish.
Number two is our proven track record to deliver an impactful marketing translation of your Amazon A+ content. Our uptimaz-ers receive extensive training on mastering the finer details of Amazon A+. Thanks to our team’s hawk-eye vision, we grasp the more visual aspects of Amazon listing translation, with a keen ability to offer consulting on the localisation of product label specifications, product videos and images: placement, resolution, background, colour and so much more!
Make no bones about it: the topic of this article is vast. It’s also critical to ensuring the long-term future of Amazon SEO. Here at uptimaz, we’re convinced by our dual prowess of human native translator-copywriters and techy search engine trailblazers – all rolled into one! If you enjoyed reading this article, we’d be pleased to talk all things Amazon listing translation.