7 Reasons Why Having a Multi-Language Site Benefits Your Business

In the digital era, the effectiveness of your website in enticing potential customers is more important than ever. An increasingly larger proportion of customers are using your website as the first point of contact with your business. So getting this right is critical when it comes to not only securing a sale, but also building a longstanding relationship with your customers and developing a high degree of brand loyalty. 

Of course, when we consider our websites, an attractive and user-friendly design should be at the forefront of your priorities. However, this shouldn’t be your only concern, with personalization playing an increasingly important role in enhancing the customer experience. 

Personalization may bring to mind tailored product suggestions, targeted advertising, and other similar concepts. But one thing we often overlook yet is critical to personalization is language. Having your website and its content available in a language accessible to visitors is crucial today – especially when we consider that 88% of customers likely won’t return to your site after a bad experience. 

At the same rate globalization and cross-border e-commerce is moving, so too should your website. A multi-language website can potentially transform your business and will become increasingly important from a competitive perspective. In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at how exactly a multilingual website will benefit your business today. 

What Are the Benefits of a Multi-Language Website?

1. Reaching a Larger Audience 

First and foremost, a multi-language website will help you expand your reach and make contact with a much wider audience. Though 58.8% of web content is in English, you wouldn’t want to miss out on the 41.2% that could bring you big business. Plus, even if your audience could speak English, 65% are more likely to convert when reading product pages in their native language, and 40% wouldn’t even buy from websites in other languages.

By providing multiple language options you’ll be opening up your business proposition to new customer segments that were previously out of reach, which will help you improve your sales and profits. 

While the opportunity to reach customers in new countries is highly appealing, it’s important not to forget that many languages could be widely spoken in your country, for example, Spanish is the second most spoken language in the U.S.A. Therefore both on a domestic and international level, going multilingual is a smart choice.

2. Reducing Bounce and Improving Conversion Rates 

According to the CSA’s ‘’Can’t Read Won’t Buy’’ study, 72.1% of consumers spend most or all of their time on websites in their own language. Having a multilingual site means that foreign consumers who visit your site are less likely to exit immediately upon discovering that it’s not available in their native language. 

The reduction in bounce rate you’ll experience due to going multilingual will have an inverse effect on your conversion rate. And this will improve thanks to consumers feeling confident that they fully understand all the steps in the purchasing process. 

3. Establishing a Competitive Advantage

As we move into economically precarious times, now more than ever businesses need to differentiate themselves to gain an advantage over their competitors. 

A multi-language website will help boost cross-border e-commerce sales, which could prove key as we move towards an increasingly e-commerce-focused retail environment. 

4. International Search Engine Optimization

For those who may be unfamiliar with SEO, the online success of a company is very much dependent on its ability to rank highly on search engine result pages (SERPs). The higher up on search engine pages your website pages rank, the more likely consumers will see them. Naturally, this will impact your eventual sales and profits. 

Of course, many of you may be fully aware of SEO and are killing it on a domestic level. However, how do you rank highly on these search engine result pages when trying to attract foreign customers, who browse in different languages? 

The key is to not only translate your site’s content but also to have it indexed on SERPs meaning that you’ve optimized it all for international SEO. This includes having 100% of your site translated – including metadata. It also entails having unique URLs with language-specific subdomains or subdirectories. Once all this is done, your website will be structured in a way that is easily scannable for search engine bots giving you a higher ranking on the result pages! Sounds like a lot of work, right? Normally, this is the case, but with a innovative multilingual solution like Weglot, this is automatically taken care of – in a seamless, hassle-free process. 

5. Customer Centrism 

As the degree of personalization, a business can provide becomes an increasingly important factor in securing customers and sales, a multilingual website is at the core of this customer-centric approach. 

If you can provide quality content in your website visitors’ own language they’ll naturally feel acknowledged and appreciative, especially if this isn’t the norm amongst your competitors. This sense of being welcomed and appreciation they show will then translate into increased commercial success. 

6. Cost-Efficient Marketing 

In the era we live in, quite often a company’s website is the focal point of its marketing strategy. What’s even more important to note is that your website is actually a really efficient way of marketing your offer, both in terms of cost and reach. 

According to marketing advisory firm DemandMetric, content marketing on your site costs 62% less than other traditional types of marketing and generates approximately 3 times as many leads! And that's with one language alone—imagine what multilingual content marketing can do for you.

So, this considered, having a multilingual website also makes a lot of sense when considering your international marketing strategy.

7. Improving Brand Image 

Nowadays, businesses have to flex in whatever way they can to impress customers, and let’s face it – a multilingual site is kind of a flex. 

A site available in many languages is proof that you’re running a global business, which implies a degree of complexity, sophistication and elaborateness – all of these things reflect highly in the eyes of the customer who’ll associate your business with quality and professionalism.

How Can I Make My Site Multilingual?

Of course, one of the major reservations businesses have when it comes to making a multilingual site is the supposed complexity and difficulty of such a project. And in most instances, they’d be right – achieving a multilingual site isn’t always a walk in the park. 

However, the Weglot multilingual solution goes against the grain when it comes to making a multi-language site, meaning you can have your multilingual website up and running in minutes! (You can start your 14-day free trial of Weglot).

Notable features include:

• Installation and setup: Unlike other multi-language options, Weglot is a no-code solution and so is extremely user-friendly. Weglot automatically detects all the content on your website (regardless of where it’s coming from e.g. another plugin). This content is then automatically translated meaning your multilingual site can be up and running in minutes.

• Compatibility: WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, regardless of your CMS, know that Weglot will integrate because Weglot is compatible with any CMS. Check out our list of integration guides.

• Simple Translation Management: While Weglot uses automatic translation to translate your site first time around, you can then manually edit translations or, if required, Weglot can provide access to professional translators if verification is required. Furthermore, the translation management features include a ‘’visual editor’’ which allows you to edit translations in a live preview of your website. 

• SEO Optimised: Weglot is an SEO-optimized solution meaning that all your content is indexed following Google best practices. It translates all of your metadata and automatically adds hreflang tags, meaning that your international SEO is covered. 

• Localization features: It’s not only the content on your site that needs to be translated. The translation of images and other media to be culturally relevant is also an important consideration to make – with Weglot, this is possible. Furthermore, make the most of the language redirection features. 

• Customer Support: Weglot has a rigorous support team that will respond to any query within one business day and work quickly to find solutions to any issues you may experience. 

Translate Your Website and Grow

Nowadays, we’re operating in a global commercial landscape where cross-border e-commerce continues to change the way consumers spend and the way in which businesses respond to these shifts in behavior. 

Having a multilingual website, while daunting, is not the Herculean task it once was and can be done seamlessly with the right solution. Take your business to the next level by translating and growing – you’re not likely to regret it.