Multilingual website: ranking a website well in several languages
Tourists, foreign customers, export: how to structure a multilingual website, use hreflang tags and translate without losing SEO.
By Léo Chuzel · Published on · 3 min read
Marseille welcomes millions of foreign visitors every year, and many local businesses also sell outside France. Hotels, restaurants, tourist activities, online stores, firms with an international clientele: offering your website in English, or even other languages, can open up a new market. Google still needs to show the right version to each visitor.
Do you really need a multilingual website?
Each language is a website to maintain: copy, news, product pages, replies to enquiries. Before translating, ask yourself three questions: do you have many foreign customers? Can you answer them in their language? Can you keep translations up to date? If so, go for it. If not, one well-made English version is better than five neglected languages.
Choosing the URL structure
- Subdirectories (mysite.com/en/): the simplest and most common solution. All languages benefit from the same domain’s authority. It’s our recommendation in most cases.
- Subdomains (en.mysite.com): possible, but more complex to manage, with no particular advantage.
- Country domains (mysite.es, mysite.de): relevant for a strong strategy in a specific country, but each domain has to build its own popularity.
Hreflang tags
These tags tell Google that several pages are translations of one another, and which language (or country) each is intended for. That way, an English user sees your page in English in the results, and a French user sees the French page.
- Each page must list all its versions, including itself.
- Links must be reciprocal: if the French page points to the English one, the English one must point to the French one.
- Add an x-default version for visitors whose language isn’t covered.
- Use the right codes: fr, en, es, or fr-BE, nl-BE to target a specific country.
On Shopify, Shopify Markets generates these tags automatically. On WordPress, a multilingual plugin takes care of them. On a custom website, they’re built into the code. In every case, check the result. For a store, also see our Shopify SEO guide.
Translate, don’t just convert
Raw machine translation is spotted immediately, and it converts poorly. Translation tools, including AI, are an excellent starting point, but every text must be proofread by someone who masters the language. Above all, do keyword research for each language: an English tourist doesn’t search with the literal translation of your French keywords.
What needs translating
- the copy, of course, but also title tags and meta descriptions;
- URLs (/en/services/ rather than /en/prestations/);
- image alt text and buttons;
- forms, error messages and automatic emails;
- legal pages and terms of sale.
Don’t redirect automatically
Automatically redirecting a visitor based on their IP address or browser language is a bad idea: a French person travelling in Lisbon would end up on the Portuguese version, and Google’s bot, which crawls mainly from the United States, might only ever see the English version. Instead, offer a discreet banner suggesting the appropriate language, and a visible language switcher.
What about local SEO?
Your Google Business Profile displays in the user’s language for certain elements, but your description stays as you wrote it. Also encourage reviews from your foreign customers: a review in English reassures an English tourist.
Our multilingual projects
We’ve designed bilingual and trilingual websites for brands, law firms and real estate agencies in France, Switzerland and Belgium: discover them in our projects. Have an international project? Our web agency in Marseille designs your multilingual website, structure and translation included. For the particular case of Brussels, read which languages to choose for a website in Brussels.