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How to translate your Amazon offering for foreign markets

As a seller on Amazon.com (or any other e-commerce site), you already know just how fierce the competition is on the marketplace. And every day the race to attract more buyers becomes even stiffer.

The reality, unfortunately, is that if you fold your arms without doing anything; sooner rather than later, you’ll be out of business.

Thankfully, you have an option to list your products on the mostly untapped Amazon foreign marketplaces such as the European Amazon marketplace and Amazon.com Japan.

And the good thing is, you’ll potentially reach as many customers on these international platforms as you would on Amazon.com minus the cut-throat competition.

Take, for instance, the European Amazon marketplace comprised of 5 countries – Spain, France, Germany, Italy, UK whose combined audience is just as large as the US version.

So, when you list your products on these new marketplaces, you significantly increase the number of customers that can see your goods. Plus, lower competition means you can expect more sales.

However, there’s a catch – you must first translate your product descriptions to the local language. Secondly, you must optimize the translated product listings with the right keywords used by local shoppers.

You may wonder, “but why do I have to translate my product listing to the foreign language before listing on the European Amazon marketplace?”

Here’s the thing – imagine you’re on an e-commerce website and you came across an image of a product you’d like to buy.

Usually, you’ll first read the product description; then you may check whether there’s any warranty on the product; and probably check shipping cost too. Once you’re satisfied with the information provided, only then do you proceed to checkout.

Now, imagine for a second that the product listing is not in English. It’s in a language you can barely identify. Do you see yourself paying for a product you hardly know what to expect?

Fact is, you are more likely to hit the return button and leave the page. That’s precisely how your customers will react when you do not list your products in their native language.

Now you have all your product listings translated to the target language. The next step is to optimize your listings with relevant keywords so your customers can find them when they search on the marketplace.

To optimize your Amazon product listing on European Amazon marketplace, you may want to consider these two keyword research tips:

Use Google Search – enter your seed keyword in Google. Visit the top 5 websites that showed up; then spy their metadata. An easy way to uncover the keywords those sites are ranking for is to inspect the source code. Copy the keywords into a text editor.

Use Amazon Campaign manager – Set up a campaign for sponsored listing, make sure though, not to activate it. Select manual keyword targeting. Use their tool to generate related keywords. Copy the keywords into a new document.

You should have quite a long list of keywords to target. However, be sure to format the keywords to the allowable 1000 characters per field.

Once completed, you’re now ready to translate the keywords into your target native language.

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