Multilingual website development, with SEO in every language

The row about the set of pages surprises most buyers. On 19 October 2026 the site we run for Business Centrum, a payroll office in Ghent, had 395 addresses in Dutch and 395 in French, but 281 in English and 281 in Turkish: the Belgian markets get every guide and wage table, the expat markets get what expats ask about. A language version is an editorial choice per market, not a copy. How to plan the markets, structure and search terms is in international SEO strategy, the annotations come from our hreflang tag generator, and what an exporter's site needs per market is in website for an export business.

The last row deserves a warning. Google asks for a separate address per language and advises against switching the language automatically on the visitor's browser or location, because its crawler mostly comes from the United States and would only ever see one version. Show a language switch the visitor chooses, and remember the choice.

Hreflang can live in the HTML head, in HTTP headers or in the sitemap. Wherever it lives, the same five errors come back:

For a company selling from one site into several European markets, the codes look like this:

Add a country only where the version really differs in price, delivery or words. One German version without a country serves Germany, Austria and Switzerland until one of them needs its own.

On our builds hreflang comes out of the content model: a page that exists in two languages links both ways automatically, a page in one language carries none, and a build check stops a broken pair before it goes live. For the definition and the code, see our glossary entry on hreflang; for the full checklist, the SEO checklist; to test a live page, the SEO checker.

• Choose the language your visitors already useif analytics shows traffic from a country that leaves fast: they find you but cannot use the page. Start with the pages they land on.
• Choose the language of your inbound requestsif clients already write or call in it. They want you; give them your services, prices and contact in their words.
• Choose the empty marketif your competitors have no page in the local language. Build a term map for that market first, the way our guide to keyword research describes, and only write the pages people search for.
• Choose the language of the lawif you sell to consumers in a country that expects information about the sale in its language: product pages, terms, checkout and emails come first.
• Waitif nobody on your side can answer a client in that language. A site in German that leads to replies in English loses the trust it just earned.

AI translation is good enough for a first draft of most business copy, and we use it that way. Published unread, it misses the words a market searches with, gets product and legal terms wrong and keeps the sentence order of the original. Our routine is a draft written from the term map of that market, a check of product and legal terms by your team, and a native reader before anything goes live. That keeps a language affordable without making it read like a manual.

Three things set the cost of a language: how many pages it gets, who writes the copy, and how much of the site talks back in that language (forms, emails, a portal, invoices). With us, a website starts at 1,500 euros for a one-pager, and a site with many pages, languages, bookings or a shop costs more; each language is a part of the quote with its own fixed price, agreed after a call. The website cost calculator shows how a second or third language moves your site. A language planned from the start costs less than one bolted on later, because menus, addresses and templates make room for it from day one.

Ranking in French in Belgium and in France are two jobs, as our article on a website in French and Dutch shows for Belgium. A Belgian employer looks for a "secrétariat social", the French market for "gestion de la paie"; competitors differ, and so do the rules a page talks about. The same holds for German in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and for English in the UK and Ireland. That is why every language starts from its own term map before we decide which pages it gets, and why an agency that only translates your keywords rarely gets far. Being cited in AI assistants follows the same logic: they answer in the language of the question, so a market without pages in its language is invisible there too, which our page on generative engine optimization covers. If you also sell from Belgium to the rest of Europe, our web development agency in Europe page covers the EU rules a site has to meet.