A professional shop available in eleven languages
A B2B distributor sold into several European countries but presented its catalogue in only two languages, which limited its credibility in some markets.
The context
The professional customer base was spread across much of Europe, but the shop spoke only two languages. Customers in other countries browsed in a language that wasn't their own, which hurt confidence when placing orders for significant professional amounts. The goal was to extend the shop to eleven languages, without ending up with eleven catalogues to maintain separately or SEO diluted across versions.
The difficulty wasn't so much the translation as structuring the multilingual setup correctly: clean URLs per language, markup clearly telling Google which version addresses which audience, and handling fields that deliberately shouldn't be translated, such as internal references.
What I did
-
Technical structuring of the multilingual setup
Setting up dedicated URLs per language and hreflang tags linking each version of the same page together, to avoid any duplicate-content signal.
-
Organising translatable content
Drawing a clear line between fields to translate (descriptions, editorial content) and fields to keep identical (references, standardised technical specifications).
-
Structured data per language
Updating structured-data markup so it stays consistent and accurate in each of the eleven languages, rather than settling for roughly translated markup.
-
Translation and update workflow
Setting up a process for easily identifying content not yet translated or that's gone out of date after an update to the source catalogue.
Frequently asked questions
Why not just translate the pages with an automatic plugin?
Do all eleven languages have the same level of content?
How is a new language added afterwards?
Was SEO affected during the rollout?
Describe your need in one minute
A few targeted questions so I can reply with an estimate rather than another questionnaire.