We all want more traffic to our website, but with so much similar content on the web, it’s not always easy to achieve. Adding an additional language to your site could be a good solution. Can you actually double the number of visitors with an extra language? Read below how to do just that and more.

Which languages do you speak?

Adding a language for an improved user experience with a plugin that offers automatic translations is usually not a great idea. Often the translation is far from perfect, and your goal is to attract actual new visitors and not give a translation option for the visitors you get anyhow.

And of course, if you offer your website in a certain language, your visitor will expect that they can also communicate with you or your company in that language.

Where is your target audience?

Growth happens always outside your current group of visitors. With adding an extra language it is obvious you will attract more visitors outside of your current geographic location. You need to make sure you are ready for this not only in communication but also in their business needs. Can you ship your products abroad and still be competitive with a healthy profit? Make sure to have this well organized.

Landing pages

What if you want to reach a specific target audience whose language you don’t speak? A perfect tool for this is a so-called “landing page”.

A carefully designed, and well written landing page can pick up interest from a new audience. Make sure it is attractive so that it invites the visitor to “click” and move to your normal language, or to the English version of your website that most people can understand, in case your main language is Greek, for example.

Make sure your SEO content for this landing page has good and smart settings in order to attract attention in the Google ranking in this new language.

How do we do this?

As you might have noticed, our website is available in 3 languages: English, Dutch, and Greek.
English because we work with customers all over the world, Dutch because we have active customers there since I am Dutch myself and I used to live there, plus it is a very interesting market. And Greek since we are now located in Greece and need to attract the local market as well.

We are not using automated translation tools, but every item is written by ourselves in each language. This makes sure that the content is picked up properly by search engines and actually increases traffic. Does a second language actually double your traffic? Maybe not, but it can multiply your traffic, because the number of potential visitors in the English language is bigger than only in Dutch or Greek.

Note: With our recent website update we have a lot of content which is not translated yet, so we have turned multi-language functionality off temporarily, until we have all content ready.

A website in several languages also means that it will take you more time to translate and adjust the content. If this is worth it, is entirely up to you. But if you do it, you need to be consistent in adding valuable content on a regular basis in each language.

Studio Koch has created a number of successful multi-language websites over the past years. If you want to learn more about them check out our portfolio pages or contact us. (In English, Dutch or Greek)