Multilingual Websites — What Almost Everyone Gets Wrong

A second language is often treated as a pure translation job. Technically it is the opposite: without the right signals a search engine sees two pages with the same content and decides for itself which one to show. Usually the wrong one.

The three technical points

Its own address per language. Each language version needs its own permanent address, for example with a language code in the path. A page that swaps its content by script without the address changing cannot be indexed separately.

The hreflang markup. It tells the search engine: this page is the German version, that one the English, and they belong together. Crucially, each version has to point at all the others, including itself.

No automatic redirect by location. Someone forced from Germany onto the German page can never reach the English one. Search engines mostly crawl from one region and then see only one version. Offer a visible language switch instead of deciding for them.

The part people talk about less

Machine translation today is good enough to be understood, but rarely good enough to sell. Technical terms, forms of address and tone are what make a native speaker notice immediately that nobody read the text.

More importantly: the search terms differ. Someone searching in German for "Website erstellen lassen" does not search in English for the literal translation. A translated page hits the other language's terms only by accident.

The honest question to ask first

Do you really need the second language? If your customers come from the region and speak German, an English version brings nothing but maintenance. If you work internationally or serve a large language community locally, it is one of the best levers there is.

If you are wondering whether and how this pays off, we are happy to look at who actually opens your site today.