"We have five language versions."
Open the site and: the homepage is translated, product pages are still English. The navigation is in Spanish, the spec table in English. The keywords are a literal carry-over from the Chinese list. That is not a five-language site. It is one language with four decorations.
Six things actually go wrong.
1. Translating without rebuilding the keyword list
The most fundamental one.
Translation renders meaning in another language. Keyword research establishes how people in a market actually search. Two different jobs.
"Precision casting" becomes investment casting in English. In German, buyers may search Feinguss. In Spanish-speaking markets, fundición de precisión. But how much those terms are searched, and how they are used, differs from the English market entirely.
The order is: research keywords in the target language first (local Google autocomplete, local competitor titles), write the content, and only then discuss translation quality.
2. Missing or broken hreflang
hreflang tells search engines that several URLs are the same page in different languages. Without it, your Spanish page and your English page can be treated as duplicates competing with each other.
Three requirements:
Bidirectional. The Chinese page declares the English page, and the English page declares the Chinese page. One direction is ignored.
Include x-default. This is the fallback for visitors whose language matches nothing, usually pointed at the English version or a language-selection page.
List every version. A page with five languages needs five hreflang entries in its head, plus x-default — not a single pointer to a default.
3. A language switcher built with JavaScript
Many sites switch language by rewriting the page content with JavaScript, or by posting a form to another URL.
In both cases the switched version is uncrawlable — a crawler only ever sees the language you started in.
The fix: make the switcher a plain <a href> link, and give every language version its own address (/es/, /de/). Then a crawler follows the links and finds all of them.
4. Unreviewed machine translation
Machine translation has improved enormously and still slips on terminology and tone.
Where a human must check, in priority order:
- Titles and H1s
- Buttons and calls to action
- Units and material names in spec tables
- FAQ pairs — these feed directly into whether AI can quote you
Quality varies more for Spanish, Arabic and Russian, and those need eyes most.
5. Subdomain or subdirectory — the choice affects your start
- Subdirectory (
domain.com/es/): inherits the main domain's authority and starts faster. The cost is doing the technical setup inside one site. - Subdomain (
es.domain.com): cleanly separated, useful when markets need genuinely different product lines, and it starts from roughly zero authority each time.
For most export sites, subdirectories win: the indexing and authority your main domain already has is a scarce resource.
6. Doing half the work
The most common half-finished states:
- Homepage and navigation translated; product pages not
- Product pages translated; FAQ not
- Everything translated, but the form is still in English — the buyer gets to the last step and discovers they must write in English
The test is simple: can a buyer who speaks only their own language go from landing to sending an inquiry without ever reading English?
The right order
- Pick one or two languages, not five. Choose by where your orders come from, and do those properly.
- Rebuild the keyword list per market. Not a translation of your existing list — fresh research.
- Write or translate, then localise. Currency, date formats, units.
- Configure hreflang — bidirectional, with x-default.
- Convert the language switcher to plain links. Anything JavaScript-based gets rebuilt.
- Read each language separately in Search Console. Which market is genuinely growing will show up in the data.
One warning
Every added language multiplies maintenance. A five-language site means changing a product spec five times. "Do one or two properly first" is an operational constraint as much as an SEO recommendation.
Before adding languages, ask who maintains the content in year two.
To find out which link in your multilingual setup is missing, see MKEO · the full approach. To have me audit your language versions and hreflang configuration, ask for a free acquisition audit.
Two related reads: every language needs its own keyword research, in stop building keyword lists from your internal product names; and if you have not yet measured which names AI returns in each market, in what AI named when asked about 20 product categories.
FAQ
What is hreflang, and why does it have to be bidirectional?
It is the markup that tells search engines these URLs are the same page in different languages. It must point both ways: if page A declares page B, page B must declare page A. One-sided markup gets ignored, which is the same as not having it.
Subdirectory or subdomain?
Both have trade-offs. A subdirectory (domain.com/es/) inherits the main domain's existing authority and starts faster. A subdomain (es.domain.com) keeps things cleanly separated when markets differ enormously. Most export sites are better off with subdirectories.
Can I use machine translation?
As a first pass, yes, but a person has to review it. At minimum check titles, H1s, buttons, spec tables and FAQs — those are what buyers see first, and what search engines and AI systems judge content quality on.