Does Your Website Need a Second Language?

Last month Google showed our English-only website to searchers in 89 countries. Someone in Germany found us by typing "schema markup für ai search." Someone in the Netherlands searched "beste website sitebouwer." A searcher in Vietnam wrote "schema markup cho ai search." We have translated nothing. The searches arrived anyway.

That is the question behind every "should I translate my website?" conversation, and most small businesses answer it blind. Either they never consider a second language, or they buy a five-language setup they stop maintaining by spring. Both mistakes are avoidable, because the evidence sits free in reports you already have. Here is how to read it, a plain test for whether translation is worth your time, and the cheap honest way to do it if the answer is yes.

Step 1: Read the two reports you already have

Open Search Console, go to Performance, and look at two tabs:

1. Countries. Where did your impressions come from? An impression means Google showed your site to a searcher there.

2. Queries. Scan the list for searches typed in another language. They jump out immediately.

Then add the evidence Google cannot see: do customers ask questions in another language in person, on the phone, in emails? Does your area have a large community that lives in another language? A taco shop in a majority Spanish-speaking neighborhood has better evidence than any report.

How to check it worked: write down two things. The share of impressions from countries that speak something other than English, and the number of real foreign-language queries. For us that is 12 German impressions on one technical topic and two stray queries, which is interesting and not a business case. Our own answer today is no, not yet.

Step 2: Apply the one-question test

The test: is there a language, singular, that real customers already use toward you, in search or in person? If yes, translate for that language only. If no, skip it and recheck the same two reports every few months. Nothing else, including what competitors do, is evidence.

When the evidence is there, it is worth more than most owners assume. CSA Research surveyed 8,709 consumers across 29 countries: 76% prefer to buy products with information in their own language, and 40% will never buy from a website in another language. In Germany, 57% said they only buy on local-language sites. If your evidence points at a language, roughly half of those potential customers cannot be reached by your English pages at any price.

Step 3: Translate the three pages that earn money

Not the whole site. Every translated page is a page you now maintain in two languages, so start where the money is:

1. Your homepage

2. Your most-booked service page

3. Your contact or booking page

The blog can wait indefinitely. A visitor who finds your Spanish services page and sees Spanish contact details can become a customer; a translated blog post from 2024 cannot. The same CSA survey found 65% prefer content in their language even when the quality is imperfect, so three good-enough pages beat forty perfect ones that never ship.

If your site runs on StoryPress, this step is one request: ask Claude to copy the services page and translate the text into Spanish, then read the result. That kind of chore is what the $5 a month is for. On any platform, the principle holds: small scope, money pages first.

How to check it worked: a stranger who speaks the language can find your price and your phone number without touching an English page.

Step 4: Machine draft, human gate

Machine translation is genuinely good now, and the honest workflow is simple: let a machine write the first draft, then have a bilingual human read every sentence before it goes live. A staff member, a family member, a regular customer you pay for an afternoon. You are checking tone and terms of your trade, which is exactly what machines still miss.

The human gate is not decoration. Google's spam policies list content translated by automated tools "where little value is provided to users" under scaled content abuse. Three reviewed pages are nowhere near that line. Forty auto-translated pages nobody read are the textbook case of it.

DeepL's free plan covers 50,000 characters a month, roughly 8,000 words, which is more than three money pages need. The paid Individual plan at 7.49 euros a month exists for when you translate file uploads or bigger volumes, which a three-page project does not.

One warning from the table: the browser widget route looks free and finished, but the translation happens inside each visitor's browser. Google indexes the original language only, so the German customer searching in German never finds you. The widget solves the wrong half of the problem.

Step 5: Give each language its own address

Google's guidance for localized pages comes down to four plain rules:

• Each language lives at its own address, like yoursite.com/es/services. No cookies, no in-place switching.

• The language versions point at each other in the page code with a label called hreflang, so Google knows they are the same page in two languages. Each version must list itself and the others.

• Translate the page title and description too. A Spanish page with an English title in the search results loses the click it just earned.

• Do not auto-redirect visitors by location. Google's own crawler visits from the United States, so a forced redirect can mean your Spanish pages never get crawled at all.

How to check it worked: two checks, two weeks apart. First, search for your service in the new language and watch which version Google shows. Second, open the Countries report again and look for impressions from the language's home countries landing on the new pages. If the new pages collect zero impressions after a month, the hreflang links are the first suspect.

The afternoon version

• Open Search Console, read Countries and Queries, write down the two numbers.

• No foreign-language evidence? Stop here. Put a quarterly reminder in your calendar.

• Evidence? Pick that one language. Translate homepage, top service page, contact page.

• Machine draft free on DeepL, then one bilingual human reads everything.

• Separate addresses per language, linked both ways, titles translated, no forced redirects.

• Two weeks later: search in that language, reread the Countries report.

We will keep publishing in English, because that is what our two reports say. Your reports may say something else, and now you know how to read them.