What are the largest & most lucrative online multilingual markets aside from English? by Mathias Levarek

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What are the largest & most lucrative online multilingual markets aside from English?
by Mathias Levarek

With Google reporting that over 50% of their traffic comes from multilingual searches, it has become crucial to consider developing a multilingual online presence. However, the question remains the same: Which markets to target? Which ones are the most important in terms of users, etc.?

First of all, let's see which parts of the world feature the most users. Contrary to general belief, it is not North America! With close to 400 million users, Asia definitely takes the lead, followed by Europe with approximately 315 million users, in comparison to 232 million in North America (North America being defined as the U.S., Canada, and Mexico).

In my extensive experience with multilingual online applications, I have learned over the years to differentiate clearly the amount of users versus the market potentiality of a product or a service. For example, the Hispanic online market (between South and Central America, the U.S., the Caribbean and Spain) features slightly more users than the French-speaking market. But when it comes to buying power, countries like France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada (Quebec) have so much more buying power than Peru, Bolivia or Chile!

More than just buying power, we need to look at the cultural ramifications involved in internet behaviors. In other terms, is a specific market used to ordering & transacting online? For instance, compared to its amount of users, France is extremely active online, while French-speaking countries in Africa are proportionally inactive. The same applies when comparing Spain and some South American countries. If you were to compare the online buying habits between 100,000 users in Spain and the same number of users throughout South America, you would notice that people out of Spain order products and services at least 5 times more than their South American peers.
In many cases, it is not a matter of buying power, but rather mail order habits based on the country's postal delivery system. In fact, in many countries where the postal system is unreliable (not to say flaky!), online users were not

Author's Biography:

Mathias Levarek, Ph.D.

SEO Consultant for

http://www.mseo.com