01 / Insights
When a second language pays off
The first question about a multilingual website has nothing to do with technology. It is whether anyone in that language searches for what you sell. CSA Research has been publishing the same finding for years: roughly 76 percent of consumers prefer buying with information in their own language, and around 40 percent will not buy in a foreign one at all. That is a strong argument, though not a blank cheque.
A second language is a permanent commitment: every new page, every price change, every article now exists twice. A half-translated website with English navigation, German body copy and untranslated legal pages converts worse than a confident monolingual one. Add a language when three things are true at the same time:
- There is measurable search demand in that language for what you offer, beyond general traffic from that country.
- You can serve customers in that language. Answering a German enquiry in English undoes the work.
- You have the capacity to keep both versions equally current, permanently.
02 / Insights
Subfolder, subdomain or country domain: decide the structure first
Where the languages live is the first big decision, and it is expensive to reverse. You have three options. Subfolders such as tanomedia.com/de/ keep every language on one domain, so links and authority accumulate in one place; for most companies this is the right default. Subdomains such as de.example.com split those signals for very little benefit. Country domains like example.de send the strongest local signal, but you are building authority from zero for each domain: realistic for a corporation, expensive for a 15-page business site.
Whatever you pick: one language per URL, consistently. Swapping content on the same URL via cookies or JavaScript means Google only ever indexes one version, and usually not the one you wanted.
03 / Insights
hreflang without tears: what it does and how it breaks
hreflang is a set of annotations that tells search engines which URL is the equivalent of which, per language and optionally per region. It does not improve rankings. Its job is routing: showing the German page to German searchers and keeping your language versions from competing against each other in the same results.
It breaks in predictable ways. The annotations must be reciprocal: if the English page points to the German one, the German page must point back, and every page includes itself in the set. The codes follow ISO 639-1 for the language plus an optional ISO 3166-1 region; pt-PT and pt-BR are different audiences, en-UK does not exist, en-GB does. x-default names the fallback for everyone who matches no version, usually your primary language. You can declare hreflang in the HTML head, an HTTP header or the XML sitemap. Pick one source of truth and generate it automatically, because hand-maintained hreflang decays with every new page.
04 / Insights
Native copy outperforms translation
Raw machine translation is the cheapest way to look absent. Google’s spam policies treat unedited, mass-produced machine translation as low-value content, and readers notice before any algorithm does. Machine translation plus a skilled native editor is a legitimate middle path for large catalogues and secondary pages.
For pages that are supposed to rank and sell, the better model is native writing: same structure, same facts, different idiom. Keywords do not translate. Germans looking for an agency type “Website erstellen lassen”, literally ‘have a website made’, a phrase no translator would ever produce from the English. Keyword research happens per language and per market. Then each version is written by someone who lives in that language.
05 / Insights
Localisation goes beyond words
The visible text is maybe half of the work. Currencies, number and date formats, phone prefixes and form fields all signal whether you operate in a market. So do the examples you cite and the trust details a market expects: a German buyer looks for proper legal pages before trusting a site, a Portuguese customer notices whether prices state VAT clearly.
Then there is the invisible half: meta titles and descriptions, URL slugs, image alt text, Open Graph tags, the 404 page, form validation messages and transactional emails. If those stay English while the page is German, both users and search engines register the seams.
06 / Insights
The mistakes that cost the most
After a few years of auditing multilingual sites, the same defects keep coming back:
- Automatic IP-based redirects. Googlebot crawls mostly from the US and may never see your other versions. Offer a polite suggestion banner instead and let people choose.
- Flags as language switchers. A flag stands for a country, and languages cross borders: there is no right flag for a Swiss visitor or for a Brazilian reading Portuguese.
- Translating the body copy while leaving title, meta description, slug and alt text untouched, so the page ranks properly in no language at all.
- hreflang without return links, or with invented codes; one broken pair can invalidate the whole set.
- Duplicate-content panic across languages. A translation is not a duplicate; pages in different languages are distinct content. The real risk is same-language regional variants, like en-US and en-GB, and that is what hreflang exists for.
- Launching language two at 60 percent and never finishing. Visitors hit the untranslated edges within two clicks.
07 / Insights
How we run tanomedia.com in three languages
Our own site is the test bench for this article. English, German and European Portuguese live as subfolders on one domain, English is the root and the x-default, and every URL slug is localised per language, this article included. hreflang is generated by our build script from a single data source into both the HTML head and the sitemap, so the two can never disagree, and every page links its alternates in both directions.
None of the three versions is a translation. Each one is written natively by people who work in that language every day, against keyword research for that market. The technical setup took a fraction of the project; keeping three languages equally sharp is the ongoing work. That is why we tell clients to add a language only where a market exists for it.
08 / Insights
The launch checklist for your second language
Before the new language goes live, walk through this list. It covers the failures we see most often:
- Keyword research done in the target language itself.
- URL structure decided, slugs localised, one language per URL.
- Every template covered: navigation, footer, forms, error messages, legal pages, emails.
- Meta titles, descriptions, alt texts and Open Graph tags written per language.
- hreflang reciprocal, self-referencing, with x-default, and generated automatically from one source.
- The language switcher lands on the equivalent page in the other language.
- No forced IP redirects; a dismissible suggestion at most.
- After launch: verify the versions in Search Console and watch which queries land where.
FAQ
Common questions
01Does hreflang improve my rankings?
Not directly. hreflang is a routing instruction and carries no ranking weight of its own: it makes sure the right language version appears for the right searcher and stops your own versions competing with each other. The benefit shows indirectly, in fewer bounces and better engagement on the correct version.
02Is translated content duplicate content?
No. Pages in different languages count as distinct content for search engines, even with identical structure. The real duplicate risk is two versions in the same language for different regions, like en-US and en-GB, which is the case hreflang was built to resolve.
03What does adding a language to a website cost?
As market orientation: professional translation runs roughly €0.08–0.15 per word, and a typical 10 to 15 page business site lands in the high hundreds to low thousands per language for native-quality copy, plus the technical setup. Planned from the start, an extra language adds a modest share to the project rather than doubling it. Our projects start at €1,500 and most launch within 2 to 6 weeks.
04Can I just machine-translate my website?
For internal gist, yes. For pages meant to rank and convert, unedited machine output is a liability: Google classifies scaled, unreviewed machine translation as low-value content, and customers notice even sooner. Machine translation with a native editor works for secondary pages; the pages that earn your money deserve native copy.