In the Canaries this isn't an optional upgrade. A large part of the market — customers, residents and businesses — doesn't operate in Spanish. A Spanish-only website is giving up on that share without realising it.
The catch is that translating halfway doesn't achieve much, and there are a handful of decisions worth getting right from the start.
What goes wrong?
The little flag with the automatic translator. The one that translates on the fly when a visitor clicks it. It's fine for reading, but Google never really stores those versions as pages in their own right, so in English or German you still don't show up. It feels like having a website in three languages when what you actually have is a Spanish one in disguise.
Translating the text but not the addresses. If your English page lives at /en/servicios, it's half translated. It should be /en/services: the address counts towards ranking too.
Each version not identifying itself as such. There are some tags — invisible to visitors — that tell Google "this page and that one are the same thing in two languages". When they're missing or only half in place, Google gets confused and may end up treating your versions as repeated content. It's the most technical part of all this and the most neglected, precisely because you can't see it from the outside.
Languages inside one website, or separate websites?
For a Canarian business selling from a single base, the best answer is almost always everything under the same domain: yourcompany.com/en/.
| Option | When |
|---|---|
yourcompany.com/en/ | The recommended one. All the standing you build accumulates on a single website |
| Separate sites per country | Only with a genuine local branch and a budget for each |
Running three separate websites means starting from scratch three times. Almost nobody has the budget for that, and it isn't necessary.
Does everything need translating?
No, and this is where most of the money is saved.
- Always translate what sells: home, services, contact and case studies.
- From the blog, only the good stuff. Eight well-translated articles do more than forty run through a machine.
- Don't translate out of obligation things that only apply here.
A website with 15 flawless pages in three languages always beats one with 60 translated halfway.
Machine translation or a person?
Machine as a first draft, human review always. Today's translators write well, but two things escape them that matter enormously on a commercial site: tone and the vocabulary of your sector. Text that persuades in Spanish, translated word by word, reads like a generic brochure.
And there's something no machine solves: people don't search in translation. What a German types into Google to find your service needn't be the literal translation of what a Spaniard types. That has to be looked at beforehand, not afterwards.
The checklist
If you already have a multilingual website, check this today:
- Each language has its own translated address.
- Each version identifies itself as the equivalent of the others (those tags mentioned above).
- All languages are registered with Google.
- The menu, forms and automated emails are translated too — this is where nearly everyone slips.
- Switching language takes you to the same page, not the homepage.
Point 5 is the one that loses the most customers: someone is reading your services page, switches to English, and lands on the homepage. Back to square one. A lot of people leave right there.
At GMB Horizon we build multilingual websites properly — this one included. You can see how on web design, or get in touch.