Your Utmost Guide to Building a Multilingual Website

In this multilingual world, reaching customers from different domains around the globe has become a necessity for your business to grow so you can stand head and shoulders above the competition. One of the most important steps to establishing a global presence for your business is to build a multilingual website.

What is a Multilingual Website?

A multilingual website is a website that is available in several languages to allow target customers to find you in their Google search. It is not just about translating the content into other languages, but it also involves localizing every single detail in a website to resonate with the expectations of target customers.

What Are the Benefits of a Multilingual Website?

In fact, building a multilingual website has a lot of benefits that you will successfully reap if done properly. Let’s highlight some of them in the following lines.

Enhanced Customer Experience

Having your website available in the languages of your potential clients will increase their engagement, especially if everything on your website is localized to fit their cultural norms and requirements. They will easily turn into leads as they will feel that you care about them.

Increased Revenues

Not all of your competitors think about building a multilingual website. Thus, if you take the initiative among others, you will have a competitive advantage and a higher number of customers from different countries.

Since most people prefer buying products in their native languages, having a website in their languages will increase their loyalty and stimulate them to buy your product or service. This way your conversion rates will be skyrocketed.

Rooted Global Presence

Incorporating the keywords your target customers use in their Google search will enable your website to rank higher in search engines and pop up frequently in results. By doing so, your target audience can easily find you and get connected to your website quickly.

Now, to achieve the above-mentioned benefits, keep reading the following crucial tips that guide you on how to successfully make your website multilingual.

How to Build the Best Multilingual Website?

If you aim at boosting the expansion process of your business by incorporating more languages to magnetize global customers, you have to keep in mind several technical and linguistics issues that we will shine a spotlight on some of them as follows:

Optimize Your Multilingual URL Structure

To allow each language to rank in search engines, you have to give each language its own structure. Moreover, when each language URL has an attractive context, visitors will be more willing to browse your website.

Here are three main methods to set a URL structure for your multilingual website:

1. Add subfolders for all the languages on your website except for the main language. Here is an example:

Main Language: yoursite.com/content

French language: yoursite.com/fr/content.

• Use one domain name for all languages with a subdomain for each language such as fr.yoursite.com.
• Set your website to have a different domain for each language. For instance, use “yoursite.com” for your main language and “yoursite.es” for the Spanish language.

Use the UTF-8 (Unicode) Character Encoding 

Actually, character encoding restricts you to a specific group of languages. However, Unicode enables you to deal with all the languages in the world. It facilitates the process of adding more languages to your content.

Apply Multilingual SEO

Applying Multilingual SEO to your website is indispensable for it to reach the highest number of customers and rank higher in search engines. Do not just apply SEO to your original website. Having a website that appears in search engines when using keywords in different languages will strengthen your global reach.

Select Your Design and Layout

When building your website, make sure that you select a design that is flexible and easy to be adapted to any language. Spacing is a very important consideration when you translate your main language into other languages as not all languages require the exact amount of space.

In addition, the language list should be easily found when visitors search for it. You can place it on the top right of your homepage or among your main headings.

At Torjoman, we have experts who fully localize your pages including layout, text, colors, navigation, imagery, calls-to-action, units of measurement, and cultural references.

Localize Your Website Entirely

Translation only will not serve your global plans. In order to reinforce your global presence, everything on your website should be fully localized starting from text, blogs, time, currencies, and ending with all visual elements including images, videos, and colors.

Torjoman is a specialist website translation company that offers you top-notch website translation and localization services tailored to meet your business requirements. Contact us now!