Building a multilingual website may have more considerations than you first think. If you haven’t developed a multilingual website before, we’re going to cover a few things to consider before and during its development.

Pros:

• Keeping your entire website on a single domain is easier and cheaper to maintain for a small team.
• Search engine rankings will benefit from a single domain approach. SEO work undertaken on the domain will benefit all content hosted on the website, making it more likely to rank and drive traffic. This is particularly beneficial if you have one well-developed market and a couple of smaller markets that typically receive less investment.
• Presents a cohesive look and feel across all markets and gives you much more control to manage your global brand.
• All content can be managed from a single central login.

Cons:

• Sometimes a local team needs to do something very different with their marketing strategy or their day-to-day operations. If this is a requirement for your site, the correct implementation of a single domain strategy will need to be taken. Find out more on single domain multilingual website implementations.
• Currency switching can be more difficult for complex websites on a single domain than with a multi-domain approach. It is possible, but often requires more development work.
• If not managed correctly, a local team can still cause the site to diverge significantly by making small variations to the regional content over time.

In the majority of cases, a multilingual website with a single domain (example.com/fr or example.com/es) will provide a greater SEO opportunity than having multiple domains. This is because all regions and languages on the website will benefit from the success of every other region and language content. If you currently have multiple domains, combining these into a single website with a single domain will combine the trust metrics of your websites, increasing your opportunity to rank highly. If you currently have a single domain to manage your international content, staying on a single domain will mean that you do not need to build up the trust and authority of a fresh domain for each region.

However this is not the case in every circumstance and we always recommend undertaking a digital strategy to understand the unique benefits and limitations for each individual business. A multi-domain strategy can be used to increase keyword specificity and to target high value keywords. An additional benefit of this approach is that conversion rate can be increased by tailoring user journeys to a particular customer group on each domain.