Development Seed Blog

Examining the ROI of Adding New Languages to Your Website

Will adding non-English content to your website boost your traffic? Common sense tells us yes. Multilingual content theoretically opens you up to new audiences in other countries. But even if your target audience is just people living in the United States, nearly 20% of Americans speak a language other than English at home, according to the US Census Bureau in 2003. 

Usually, publishing multilingual content calls for a trade off in resources, so before undertaking it you want more to go on than just common sense. So how can your organization determine the return on investment for adding multilingual content to your website? Your obvious gain would be an increase in traffic. It’s no secret that major search engines account for a good chunk (45-75%) of most websites’ traffic.

It is important to point out here that search engines typically return results for sites in the language that folks search in. So if folks search for “beisbol” they will get results in Spanish – the top Google results for “beisbol” are Spanish language baseball coverage from Fox Sports and ESPN. So chances are pretty good that no matter how much investment you make on SEO, your single language website will be invisible to folks searching in another language.

I used Google Trends to see how searches on “beisbol” compared to those on “baseball.” As you can see from this image, there are a lot more English searches than Spanish searches.

Given the search term, this is hardly surprising. But take a look at the breakdown of searches by country.

This shows that folks in Spanish-dominant countries are searching in their own language, and that they’re not getting to the English language content as a result. Interestingly, people in Puerto Rico search more often in English than Spanish, and people in the Dominican Republic slightly favor English in their searches.

Ultimately, you should base your decision on your market. Should you focus your efforts on a smaller, yet exploding, market or work on building your share of the mature English market? There really isn’t a single answer here, but this information indicates that if you have an international focus and aren’t providing content in non-English languages, a lot of your target audience won’t see you.

We’ll be looking into the effects of multilingual content on traffic patterns soon. If you have any experiences you would like to share, please let us know in the comments!