Blog: Search Traffic

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.