Does my business website need to be in English and the local language?
Build a second language version when a real share of your customers search or read in that language, not because it looks more professional. Get your busiest pages translated properly by a person, give each language its own URL with hreflang tags, and subtitle your videos in both languages so nobody is left out.
Who are your customers, and what do they search in?
Before you translate anything, look at who actually contacts you. Check your enquiry form, your Google Business Profile messages and any analytics you have for the language people are browsing in. A Plovdiv accountant with mostly Bulgarian clients and a handful of expat ones needs a different answer than a Rotterdam agency that pitches to international companies as often as Dutch ones.
In the Netherlands and Germany, plenty of your customers can read English, but that does not mean they want to. People search in their own language and trust a business that answers them in it, especially for anything involving money, health or legal detail. In Bulgaria, the opposite pull often applies: international clients, tourists and foreign companies expect an English version alongside the Bulgarian one, and a Bulgarian-only site quietly turns them away before they ever reach out.
There is a middle case worth naming too: a business that is fine in one language today but expects to grow into the other market within a year or two. If that is you, it is usually cheaper to build the site with a second language in mind from the structure up, even if you translate the content later, than to bolt it on afterwards.
- Look at your enquiry history: which language do people write to you in?
- Check where your traffic comes from geographically, not just which language your site is in.
- If you serve expats, tourists or cross-border B2B clients, a second language usually pays for itself.
Proper translation versus machine translation
For your core pages, pay a professional translator or use a colleague who is genuinely fluent in both the language and your industry. Machine translation is fast, but it slips on tone, gets prices and terms slightly wrong, and reads oddly to a native speaker in ways that quietly damage trust.
A practical middle ground for lower-priority pages, like older blog articles, is a machine translation pass followed by a human read-through to fix anything that sounds off. Never publish a homepage, a price page or a contact form that has not been checked by a real speaker of that language.
The technical basics: URLs, hreflang and a clear switch
Each language needs its own set of URLs, such as /en/services and /nl/services, rather than one page that swaps text with a script. Search engines index each language version separately, which is what lets you actually rank in both.
Add hreflang tags so Google knows which page is the English version of which page in Dutch, German or Bulgarian, and serves the right one in the right country. And make the language switcher visible in the header, not buried in the footer, and keep the visitor on the same page when they switch rather than dropping them back on the home page.
Which pages to translate first
You do not need to translate everything on day one. Start with the pages that carry the enquiry: the home page, your main service pages, prices and the contact page. Legal pages, including your privacy policy, need to exist in whichever language the visitor is reading in too.
Blog articles can follow later, prioritised by which ones already bring in traffic or answer questions your other-language customers actually ask. A thin translation of every page beats a perfect translation of three, but a perfect translation of the pages that convert beats both.
It also helps to think about which pages someone reads right before they contact you. If most enquiries come after someone reads your prices and one service page, get those two exactly right before you touch anything else, including older articles that get little traffic.
Video and subtitles in both languages
If you have a hero video or promo film on your site, most visitors watch with the sound off, so subtitles matter more than a dub. Burn in or add subtitle tracks in each language version of the page rather than relying on the platform's automatic captions, which still misread names and industry terms. I've written more on getting subtitles right on business videos.
What this looked like for a real project
I built Danini Correct's website, a 39-page site for an accounting firm in Plovdiv, in Bulgarian and English from the start: separate pages per language, an enquiry form, Google Maps, testimonials, an FAQ and legal pages in both. Clients could read the version they were comfortable in, and the firm could be found by Bulgarian and English searches alike.
If you want one person to handle the copy, the translation checks and the technical setup together, that is the kind of work I do through websites and marketing.
Questions people also ask
Do I need hreflang tags if I only have two languages?
Yes. Hreflang tells search engines which page is the equivalent in the other language, so people searching in Dutch or German see the right version rather than the English one ranking everywhere.
Should each language have its own domain?
Not usually necessary for a small business. Subfolders like /en/ and /bg/ on one domain work well and are far easier to maintain than separate domains or subdomains.
Do I need to reshoot my videos in each language?
Rarely. Subtitles in each language usually do the job. Reshooting only makes sense if the video leans heavily on spoken detail that a caption cannot carry, such as a long explainer.
How much does it cost to translate a website properly?
It depends on page count and whether you use a professional translator or a bilingual team member. Budget for the core pages first; a machine-translation-plus-review approach keeps later pages affordable.
Want the marketing handled too?
Websites, Google, social media and ads, made by the same person as the video.