Service
Multilingual websites where each language earns its own place in search
Each language needs its own URL and a reciprocal hreflang annotation, and each page must point its canonical at itself. Get the canonical wrong and only one language stays indexed; the rest quietly disappear, and nothing on the site looks broken while it happens.
Who this is for
Companies selling into more than one language market from one brand — typically Chinese and English together, sometimes Japanese, sometimes a market-specific third. Also anyone whose current site has a flag dropdown driving machine translation.
Where you are stuck
The usual setup is eight flags in the header and a translation plugin behind them. It feels like reach. What it produces is eight thin versions of the same page, all telling search engines this content exists in eight places — and buyers who can tell within one sentence that nobody wrote this for them.
What we do
- 1Decide how many languages by counting who you can actually reply to, not by how many flags fit in the header.
- 2Put each language on its own URL under one domain, so the whole site accumulates authority in one place instead of splitting it.
- 3Set canonical and hreflang so every version is independently indexable and none of them competes with the others.
- 4Write the content in each language rather than converting it, because the questions buyers ask are not in the same order in every market.
- 5Handle the parts nobody warns you about: font fallbacks, date and number formats, and the layout that only breaks in the language you do not read.
Proof you can open
This site is the demonstration. It runs in English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Japanese; every page has its own URL per language, canonical points at itself, and all four declare each other. Switch the language in the header and check any page you like — including this one. The Southeast Asia storefront we built is the same approach applied to a client selling across several countries.
Real client work
Questions we get asked
- Can I just use a translation plugin?
- You can, and for a brochure site it may be enough. It stops being enough when the translated pages are where you expect enquiries to come from — a machine-translated product page reads as machine-translated to the buyer, in his own language, faster than you would notice in his.
- Should each language have its own domain?
- Almost never. A separate country domain is a separate site to build authority for, from zero. Subdirectories under one domain keep everything in one place. The exception is when a market legally requires a local entity.
- What if I only have content in one language right now?
- Then start with one and build the structure so adding the second is a content job rather than a rebuild. That is the whole difference: retrofitting languages later is where sites end up with three versions competing with each other.
- Do you write the translations?
- We write the structure and work with you on the copy. For languages we work in, we write. For others we set up the slots and review what comes back — what we will not do is run it through a machine and call it a language version.
Tell us what you need
No packages and no price list — the number depends on what you actually need. Tell us what you sell and to whom, and you get a real answer rather than a range.