Why translating your website won't get you found in another language

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921

When I built the city pages for my own website, I started with what looked like the most logical approach: six towns in French, and the same six translated into German. One page per town, in both languages, neatly mirrored.

On paper, the coverage was complete. In practice, five of the six German pages targeted French-speaking towns where almost nobody searches in German, and the one region where my German version had a real audience fit on a single page shared by two towns. I even had a French page for two German-speaking towns.

It is a common reflex for any business that works in more than one language: treating visibility in the second language as a translation job. Yet it is built from the way your clients search, in their language and from where they are, and the map that comes out of it almost never looks like your site structure.

Why translation alone doesn't make you exist in the other language

Every multilingual market has language borders, and search respects them scrupulously. A client who searches in German expects results written for German speakers near them; a client a few kilometres away searches in French and thinks of other towns and other providers. Two markets, two vocabularies, two maps.

Demand doesn't translate

A translated page inherits the structure of the original, not its demand. On my own site, the French page for my most-searched town answers a real need and gets real queries. Its German equivalent for the same town barely shows up in search, because nobody there looks for a local provider in German. Translating that page means publishing an answer to a question nobody asks.

Worse, these pages without demand don't stay neutral. They compete with your general pages in the same language, on the same regional terms, and scatter signals Google would have concentrated on a single, stronger address.

A city page with an interchangeable name

The other drift is well known: duplicating a page and changing only the town name. Google calls these doorway pages and treats them as such, that is, as an attempt at manipulation rather than a useful answer.

A local page is only justified if it says something no other page on your site says: a context, a clientele, an example specific to that place. If you can swap one town name for another without changing anything else, the page has no reason to exist.

1. Start with a flawless Google Business Profile

Before any city page, there is your Google Business Profile. It feeds the map and the local block shown above the classic results, and it is often a client's first contact with you, before they even open your website.

Write your identity the same way everywhere

Your name, address and phone number must appear in exactly the same form on your website, your Google profile, local directories and your professional profiles. Specialists call it NAP, for Name, Address, Phone: every variation forces search engines to wonder whether it really is the same business.

Then choose precise categories, describe your services in the language of your main clientele and add real photos of your work. The profile doesn't need to be bilingual to work; it needs to be accurate, complete and kept up to date.

Client reviews matter too. Ask for one after every successful project and reply to each of them, criticism included, in a tone that sounds like you. A living profile with recent exchanges inspires more trust than a flawless one that has been silent for months.

2. Create a local page only where demand really exists

Once the profile is in place, local pages take over for searches that mention a town. The rule is simple: one page per area where your clients actually search, in the language they search in, and none elsewhere, even if the site structure then looks less symmetrical.

What I fixed on my own website

On the German side, I removed the pages for French-speaking towns and refocused the set on the three towns where German-speaking clients actually search. Each page now carries what sets its town apart: an industrial base and engineering firms for one, an international clientele and direct booking for another, a role as regional capital and crossroads for the third.

Let's be honest about the limit: a local page doesn't bring you physically closer to your clients. On the map, proximity weighs heavily, and a business based in a town will keep an edge there over a studio based elsewhere. What the page can do is make you relevant when distance is not the first selection criterion.

3. Declare each language with hreflang and separate URLs

For pages that truly exist in several languages, Google needs to know which one to serve to whom. That is the job of the hreflang attribute: a label in the code of each page that says “here is my French version, here is my German version”, like a bilingual sign at the entrance to a village.

Separate the URLs, cross-link the versions

The declaration comes down to three rules:

• each language has its own URL, for example /fr/ and /de/, never a widget that translates the page on the fly at the same URL;
• each version declares all the others as well as itself, because a one-way relationship is simply ignored;
• a default version tells search engines what to show every other visitor.

The translation itself deserves the same care. A German version written for Switzerland writes “heisst” without the eszett and “Offerte” rather than “Angebot”, with words that are often longer and overflow buttons designed for French. It is also a matter of web design : a multilingual layout is designed for the longest language, not the shortest.

Your clients' map comes before your site structure

Visibility across languages is not a translation problem, it is a mapping problem. Who searches for what, in which language and from where: once that map is drawn, the number of pages, their language and their content follow almost mechanically.

One page, one town, one real demand

That is the order I follow for my own website as for my clients', and it is the foundation of any local SEO that lasts: the profile first, then the pages demand justifies, then the languages declared properly. Fewer pages, but each one has an audience waiting for it.

This approach means giving up pages that felt reassuring, because they gave the impression of covering every market. But coverage that matches no search is not a presence. It is noise Google has to sort out for you.

Ready to be found in every language you work in?

Being visible in two languages doesn't take twice as many pages. It takes knowing where your clients look for you, in which language, and answering them there, with pages that talk about their town rather than a translated template. The rest follows, at its own pace.

👉 Do you work in more than one language and want your website to reflect it? Get in touch