Does your Costa Blanca website need to be in three languages?

The Costa Blanca is unusual. Your customers might be Spanish, British, Dutch, German, Belgian or Scandinavian, sometimes all in the same week. So should your website speak all of them?

Start with who actually pays you

Look at your last twenty customers. If eighteen were Spanish, a beautifully translated English site will not change your revenue. If you run a holiday rental in Moraira or an estate agency in Jávea, the opposite is usually true. Languages cost money to build and to maintain, so pick them from evidence, not from ambition.

The usual answer around here

For most businesses between Dénia and Calpe, Spanish and English cover the great majority of enquiries. Dutch is worth adding if you are in a sector with a strong Dutch and Flemish customer base — property, healthcare, home services and holiday lets in particular. German follows a similar pattern further south.

Translation is not the same as writing

Running your Spanish page through an automatic translator produces text that reads as foreign to a native speaker, and Google can tell too. Each language version should read as though it was written for that reader: the same offer, the same facts, but natural phrasing and the search terms people in that language actually type. "Diseño web" and "web design" are not the same query and they attract different people.

Set it up so Google understands

This is the part that goes wrong most often. Each language needs its own address — for example a /es/ and a /nl/ section — and the pages need to tell Google that they are versions of each other rather than duplicates. Done properly, a Spanish searcher gets your Spanish page and a Dutch searcher gets your Dutch page. Done badly, Google picks one, ignores the rest, and you have paid for translations nobody sees.

A sensible way to start

Build one language properly first. Add a second when you can point at real enquiries you are missing. A site with one excellent language beats a site with three mediocre ones every time.

Our own site runs in English, Spanish and Dutch, so we build this every day. If you are unsure which languages are worth it for your business, tell us who your customers are and we will give you an honest answer, even if the answer is "just one".