Should your Small Business Website be Multilingual?
A multilingual website is a website that has content in two or more languages. This is a great option if your small business is targetting clients where English is not their first language.
With the use of specialised software and Google Translate they are surprisingly straightforward to implement. This means they are a viable option for small businesses looking to grow their business in new markets.
We recently completed a project for Inma Moreno. She is a Business, Life and Sports Performance Coach and needed her website to have its content in both English and Spanish.
1. Specialised Software
The first step in getting your website multilingual is choose the right software tools. There are lots of multilingual software you can use. In this recent project we used Polylang. This software fully integrates with WordPress to create multilingual websites. It can be used for just one extra language to 10 languages.
2. The steps involved in setting up a multilingual website
Where a multilingual website is required, we first set up the English version and get this approved before we take the next step. Once approval is received we use Google Translate to translate the website into the second language – in this case Spanish. As the client is a native Spanish speaker she then reviewed the Spanish language version and made any changes as required.
3. Getting the most out of your multilingual website
To get the most out of your multilingual website it needs to be optimised for both the English and foreign language versions. We usually advise using separate child domains and have each version in a separate location so that the website uses language specific SEO keywords.
We also advise splitting the website’s Google tools for each language based on the different language websites. If this isn’t done, Google data combines the different languages together and makes understanding the Google results harder.
4. Types of small businesses that can benefit from a multilingual website
There are lots of different types of small business that can benefit from having a multilingual website. This is as diverse as a legal firm that provides services to a market where English is not the first language of their clients. It could also include tourist websites that are encouraging tourists from a particular part of the world. It may also be a small business that is looking to export its good to a new market where English is not widely spoken.
Dynamic Websites specialise in small business web design. We are based in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn and provide services throughout Australia. We understand what it takes to get a small business online at an affordable price and with the minimum of fuss. Along with designing websites for small business, tradies and NDIS service providers we provide online marketing services. Our online marketing for small business extends to Google Ads, Google My Business, Microsoft Advertising, search engine optimisation (SEO), content writing and, blog writing.
