East Midlands in any other language
April 23rd, 2008
PRESS RELEASE
Contact: Kaila Krayewski
April 9, 2008
Tel.: 01273 704434
Mobile: 079 385 66952
E-mail: Kaila@obanmultilingual.com
www.obanmultilingual.com
East Midlands in any other language
The Irish Times recently reported that Brighton-based business Oban Multilingual is providing international optimisation services for the Danish Tourism website. But the Danes aren’t the only ones making use of multilingual search engine optimisation to promote their region to other cultures.
The East Midlands Tourism’s international websites have been optimised in four languages: German, French, Dutch and Spanish. Traffic to the Spanish and Dutch versions of the website was up nearly 30 percent last month.
Traffic for the French and German sites went up over 90 percent.
The optimisation work is part of the East Midlands Development Agency’s vision to become a flourishing region by 2020. East Midlands Tourism was established by EMDA in 2004 to promote the travel and leisure industry in the region.
EMT is seeking to use its newly internationalised websites in conjunction with other marketing initiatives to increase the number of overnight staying visitors in the region. Its future marketing plan focuses on Germany, Dutch and French tourists.
According to the East Midlands Tourism website, currently only seven percent of income from tourism in the region comes from inbound visitor spend.
Oban started working on the website only two months ago. Already, the site is seeing page one rankings on Google for various relevant search terms.
“These results show that international SEO can lead to a very significant increase in traffic and visibility in just a short amount of time,” says Greig Holbrook, director of Oban.
“Tourism-based businesses,” he continues, “are beginning to realise that they can really benefit from having websites in languages other than English, which allow them to target non-English speakers.”
According to the Office for National Statistics, nearly half of all inbound tourists to the UK use the internet to research their destinations ahead of the journey.
“As 70 percent of internet users don’t speak English,” says Greig, “there are huge chunks of the global travel market simply not finding travel providers’ sites.”
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