A multilingual business site, technical pitfalls worth knowing about
A multilingual site is a natural step when a company moves beyond one market. It sounds simple, "let us add English", but underneath lie a few technical decisions that determine whether Google correctly understands and shows each language version. A poorly run translation can harm rankings instead of helping.
Three approaches to structure
Usually one of these layouts is chosen:
- Subdirectories (
yourcompany.com/en/), the simplest to maintain, inheriting the main domain's trust. - Subdomains (
en.yourcompany.com), more separated, a bit harder for SEO. - Separate domains (
yourcompany.co.uk), sensible for strongly different markets, but the most work.
For most small and medium businesses, subdirectories are the safest choice.
Pitfall number one: no language markers
Google has to know that a given page is the English version of a Polish one, special markers (hreflang) serve this purpose. Without them, the search engine may treat the language versions as duplicates or show the wrong version to the wrong users.
The most common mistake is "translate the content but forget the technical links between versions". The result: two versions compete in Google instead of complementing each other.
Pitfall number two: auto-translating everything
Plugins that translate "on the fly" can be convenient, but automatic translation can be clunky, and, badly implemented, it slows the site down and multiplies addresses. It is better to consciously translate the content that is genuinely meant to serve a given market.
We will plan it sensibly
Choosing the structure, correct language markers, performance and clear version switching, all of this is worth setting up once, at the start, so you do not have to unwind ranking problems later.
Planning a site in several languages or having trouble with one? Get in touch, we will help sort it out technically.