5 Common Mistakes With Multilingual Website and How to Avoid Them

From easy navigation to choosing your brand colors wisely, there are so many ways to capture customer attention and bring them to your website. But when it comes to a multilingual website, you’ll find that common mistakes actually turn potential customers away, sometimes forever.

5 Multilingual Website Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

If you’re interested in attracting traffic to your website with or without social media, you’ll need to take your brand to a global audience. Here are some mistakes to avoid for multilingual sites.

1. Not Considering SEO for Each Language

It’s essential to ensure each language version of your website is optimized for search engines, particularly Google, according to their individual rules and regulations. If you don’t take the time to do this, your multilingual website won’t be seen by users in various countries globally.

To solve this problem, make sure you have translated, localized content for people in select countries. But if you’re translating the website into French, for example, it would help to explore French culture and language via native-level language classes to tighten up your marketing.

2. Ignoring Cultural Nuances Between Countries

When translating content from one language into another, it’s essential to bear in mind that certain words may mean something different or have different connotations. It’s also possible that you could offend someone or completely change the meaning of the sentence this way.

For example, in American culture, we use terms like “love” very liberally, but a Japanese person wouldn’t use that word unless you’re very close to them. If you haven’t lived or experienced another person’s culture, consider getting a cultural specialist to help with your translations.

3. Not Localizing or Redirecting Pages Correctly

If your website doesn’t redirect the user correctly after they switch to the other version of your site, the user may get frustrated and click away. But that’s the least of your problems. A false redirection can lead Google to not index certain pages, or, worse, penalize your whole website.

That’s because Google will consider this content as a “duplicate” of the English webpage, and duplicate content can tank your SEO. To fix this, you need your site to recognize the user’s IP address. Once it does, the webpage will switch to a translated version and avoid duplication.

4. Failing to Test All Versions of Your Multilingual Website

One huge mistake companies make is failing to test their website before making it live. Not only can this cause serious SEO issues, but it can make your company look unprofessional. If the website looks poorly translated, customers will think you’re unorganized or a bad scammer.

If you’re using an automatic translator, run these translations through a human before using anything it writes. Next, check for technical and usability issues. You can run tests by changing your IP address and visiting your site to see if you get any pop-ups or automatic translations.

5. Not Keeping a System in Place for Language Updates

Not having a plan in place to keep language versions up-to-date is another common mistake. If your website isn’t regularly updated with fresh content, then its rankings in search engines will suffer as a result. It’s essential to have an ongoing strategy for updating the website often.

But how often should you update your content? That depends on your industry and what you have time for. With that said, you should always work on an English version and all respective translations at the same time, so non-English readers can keep viewing your quality content.

By keeping these tips in mind when creating a multilingual website, you can ensure that your site performs well across multiple languages and countries as you expand your global reach.