Does a Multilingual Website Affect SEO?

In an increasingly globalized world dominated by multinational corporations, multilingual websites have become the norm for many businesses. Although the benefits of multilingual websites are very noticeable in the business world, the SEO impact of adding new languages is often overlooked. In this article, we will explore the impact of multilingualism on search engine optimization, website traffic, and domain authority, as well as analyze ways to solve problems and address challenges that may arise when adding new language versions to a website.

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Without taking the right steps, a multilingual website will not bring benefits

For a website to support multiple language versions, modifying its structure is essential, and simply adding new languages will significantly change its content. Combining these two factors can be very risky if the necessary precautions are not taken. This can have many unwanted side effects:

• Changes to the website structure can reduce its level of optimization: you must always be cautious when making significant changes to your site's structure. When adding new snippets of code and removing existing ones, issues may arise with the optimization level of individual pages. This can lead to crawling difficulties and, as a result, a lower quality score.
• Content in new languages can lower content quality in the eyes of search engine bots: if you do not separate this content and mark it with the appropriate language tag, search engine bots may interpret it as misspelled, meaningless, or irrelevant. That is precisely why dedicated tags are available to accurately specify the language of a given page. Mixing different languages on a single page is strongly discouraged.

These are very real risks that must be considered when implementing additional language versions, so it is important to approach this task properly. If you are not confident in your coding and SEO skills, it is worth hiring an agency to do it for you!

Multilingual websites have greater long-term potential

However, going multilingual does not mean your SEO efforts are doomed to fail - it has huge potential when used correctly (you can check out more information on this topic on our subpages dedicated to SEO in the UK, SEO in France, or website promotion in Spain). Many things are only possible through multilingual websites:

• Site authority built for the primary language version carries over to the new languages: website authority is built through backlinks and organic traffic to the site in its primary language version. As support for new languages is added, this authority carries over to the subsequent versions, and you will be able to rank well for targeted keywords much more easily than by building a completely new website for the new language and market. This will improve your starting position, which is crucial for achieving success.
• It allows you to target local SEO efforts toward new markets and new locations: the only way to target local markets in other regions of the world is by adding support for those locations and languages to your website. Even if you see a drop in traffic for the primary language and market, the additional traffic and revenue from new markets will, in most cases, more than compensate for these losses. This is a major factor driving many companies to add new language versions to their websites.