How to Optimize Your Proz Profile. Part 1
(make your profile stand out on the platform)
Want your ProZ profile to yield more results for your translation business? Here is a guide with the most important things you need to pay attention to while perfecting your page. Since implementing these recommendations I saw a boost in SEO-performance of my profile, traffic to my page from directory and search engines increased and I am getting more direct business proposals.
Related post: How to Optimize Your Proz Profile. Part 2
Table of contents:
Professional membership
Completing profile information
Kudoz points
Reviews
This is pretty basic and will improve your profile appearance greatly. It makes your profile appear more professional. It influences where your profile is shown in the directory of translators: paying members appear first to outsources when they look for translators. It improves SEO of your page and much more of the good stuff.
The subscription does come with numerous benefits. For me the outcome from using their subscription service for more than 2 years has been great. I shared more about it in another post that you might want to check out.
Related post: Is Proz Membership Worth it?
Offering your services on the Internet means that your online presence needs to be optimized very well. Everything about your business on the web should tell your story as an independent professional. Proz seems to be the main marketplace for translators and outsourcers at the moment. That’s why any translator’s profile on this platform needs to be upgraded in the first place. Essential things to provide are your real name, native and other working languages, fields of expertise etc. But that’s not all!
ProZ has a special profile improvement guide which will tell you what needs to be added in order for your page to make a good impression. It can be found at the following link: https://www.proz.com/profile-completion.
Just follow the instructions there until the top banner says that required profile fields are 100% complete. When that happens, there will be a green checkbox next to your name when it appears in the directory search results as can be seen on the screenshot below:
Now let’s work a bit more on your position in the translation directory.
When an outsourcer is searching for a translator, they go to the directory, chose a working language pair and field of specialization. Then they receive a list of suggested linguists who match their criteria. The order in which the language service providers appear in the directory depends on two things. The first one is professional membership, the second one is Kudoz points in the selected language pair and area of specialization. The more KudoZ points you have, the higher your name will appear in the directory.
As you can see on the screenshot below, the list of translators is sorted by descending amount of Kudoz points a translator has (shown in the rightmost column).
What are Kudoz points and how to get them?
Whenever a ProZ user isn’t sure how to translate a certain word, phrase or term, they ask a question on the platform and other professionals can suggest their translations. After a certain time, the person who asked a question will chose the best answer. The person who suggested the winner translation will be rewarded with Kudoz points.
List of Kudoz points in your language pair can be found at https://www.proz.com/kudoz/. You can also subscribe in order to receive email notifications about new Kudoz questions not to miss any of them!
If the previous pieces of advice will not take long to complete, receiving Kudoz points will be a much more time-consuming task. But if your translations are chosen as the best, this will pay off big time, I promise!
“94% of online customers read reviews before making any purchasing decisions. Reviews not only have the power to influence consumer decisions but can strengthen a company’s credibility.” (Source)
In the translators directory outsourcers have an option to filter search results by those which have at least one positive client review; see the screenshot on the right. This means that when this option is selected, the outsourcer is not going to see translators who don’t have any feedback at all!
From experience, I can tell that your clients will likely never leave a review on your ProZ page if you don’t ask them to do it. I advise you to make a habit of asking your clients to leave reviews based on your cooperation after completing a project. Though not possible to measure the influence metrics of this one, in one way or another it is going to pay off for your business!
I hope this post was useful for you and will bring great results. Feel free to reach out and let me know how it’s impacting your translation business.
