Multilingual Website: How to Conquer Foreign Markets
English isn’t enough. How to structure hreflang tags and localize content so it resonates culturally with Finnish, Swedish or German customers.
Estonia is a small market. If you want to grow, exporting is inevitable. But translating your site with Google Translate is not enough. If you want to sell in Finland, you must feel like a Finnish company. This article covers technical SEO and cultural localization.
Translation vs localization
These are two very different things.
- Translation: swapping words. “Buy cheap shoe” may be correct but awkward and untrustworthy.
- Localization: adapting the message to culture, currency, units and habits. In the US you say “elevator”, not “lift”. In Finland, trust improves when you show the “Luotettava Kumppani” badge.
The technical backbone: hreflang
Google must know which language version to show each user. If a German searches your product, they should land on /de/, not /en/ or /et/.
That’s what hreflang tags are for. It’s a header snippet that tells Google: “This page is in English, and here is the same content in German.”
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de/page" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/en/page" />
Without this, Google may treat language versions as duplicate content and penalize your site.
URL structure
You have three main options for multilingual setup:
1. Subdirectories — RECOMMENDED
example.com/fi/ , example.com/de/
The easiest to manage. All SEO authority stays on one domain. Ideal for most companies.
2. Subdomains
fi.example.com , de.example.com
Google treats these as separate sites. Useful if you have very different products per country, but it doubles SEO work.
3. Country domains (ccTLD)
example.fi , example.de
Most trusted locally, but also the most expensive and complex. Requires a separate marketing budget for each market.
Content nuances
Different markets search differently.
- Keywords: In Estonia people search for “kodulehe tegemine”, in the UK it’s “web design”. Direct translation doesn’t work. Do keyword research for each market.
- Design: Asian markets prefer dense layouts, Scandinavia prefers minimalism and lots of whitespace. The US loves big, bold headlines (“Best in the World”).
- Contacts: German pages require an “Impressum”. Finnish users expect a phone number in the header.
Planning to go international?
Don’t let weak translations and poor SEO hold your business back. We’ll build a technically perfect multilingual site.
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