A translate button does not make your site multilingual. Google only indexes what has its own address. We build a real version per language — this site runs in six, and a client's site in ten.
/nl/, /pl/, /en/ — each language a URL Google can index and rank separately. A translate widget adds nothing to visibility.
Every page points to its counterparts in the other languages, with x-default. Without it your own language versions compete with each other.
Copy is written per language and read by someone who speaks it. A reader spots machine translation within two sentences.
premiumhouses.nl runs in ten languages, lookartsvision.com in six, d-kozijnen.nl in nine. All three built by us.
The temptation is obvious: one button on the site and done. The problem is that such a button only replaces the text in the browser. No second page exists, so there is nothing to index — in Polish or German you remain exactly as invisible as before.
The second mistake is subtler: redirecting automatically on browser language. It looks tidy, but a crawler sending an English header then gets a redirect instead of the page it asked for. We reversed that on this very site; now only a deliberate choice by the visitor redirects, and search engines always get a plain 200.
Every price change has to land in every language. We advise starting with two languages that genuinely pay off, not six because it is possible.
We write Dutch, Polish and English ourselves. For legal or medical copy in other languages you are better off with a sworn translator; we build the structure around it.
For findability, yes: no second page is created, so Google has nothing to index. For an internal intranet it is fine; for a site meant to win customers it is not.
Less than people expect, because the structure is already there. The cost sits in the copy and the proofreading, not in the technology.
Yes. The setup is built for it from day one: another language means adding copy, not rebuilding.
Through hreflang links between all versions plus an x-default. We verify it after launch with our own SEO checker, which tests exactly this.
Tell us who you want to reach and in what language. We will say which languages make sense — and which do not.
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