"French, English and Spanish Websites: How to Handle SEO?"

A business in Santa Teresa often needs more than one language. Guests arrive from North America and Europe, suppliers and staff work in Spanish, and a French owner may want a French page for their own market.

Adding the translations is the easy part. What decides whether they work is the plumbing underneath, and there are three ways it commonly goes wrong.

Give each language its own address

The most common mistake is switching languages in the browser without changing the URL. The page looks translated, and to a search engine it doesn't exist: there's only one address, so only one version can be indexed.

Each language needs its own URL. Three forms are acceptable:

• a folder: `site.com/en/`, `site.com/es/`
• a subdomain: `en.site.com`
• a separate domain per country

The folder is the simplest to run and the one I'd choose in almost every case. What matters is that a link to the English page can be sent to someone and open in English.

I learned this on my own site, where the blog has real per-language addresses while the rest of the pages switch in the browser. That's a deliberate compromise, and it means only the blog is genuinely indexable in four languages.

Declare the alternatives

Once each version has an address, the site has to say they're the same page in different languages. That's what `hreflang` is for, and it's a line in the head of each page pointing at every version, itself included.

Two rules make it work. Declare only languages you actually serve: announcing a Spanish page that redirects elsewhere contradicts itself. And add an `x-default` for people whose language you don't cover.

Skip this and search engines treat your three versions as three competing pages saying nearly the same thing, which serves nobody well.

Translate the whole page, not the visible part

Titles, descriptions and image alt text are what a search engine reads first, and they're what gets left in the original language most often.

A page whose body is in English but whose title is in French will be shown in results with a French title. The visitor never clicks.

The same goes for the URL itself where you can manage it: an English page at an address made of French words works, but it's a missed signal.

Two languages done properly beats four done quickly

This is the part I'd argue hardest for.

An unreviewed machine translation is visible immediately to a native speaker, and it undoes the trust everything else on the page has built. Someone about to send a deposit across the world is reading for reassurance, and awkward phrasing reads as carelessness.

Pick the two languages that carry your bookings, have a native speaker read them aloud, and add a third when there's a real reason.

Which languages, in practice

For a business on that coast: English carries most international visitors, Spanish is the language of the country and of anyone searching locally.

French only earns its place if you're actively selling to a French market: for a French owner in Costa Rica that's often true, and it's worth being honest about whether it is.

What to check on an existing site

Four things, and you can go through them in an afternoon.

Does each language have its own address that you can send to someone? Do the titles and descriptions change with the language? Are the `hreflang` lines present and pointing at pages that actually exist? And does the site avoid guessing: forcing a visitor into a language based on where they seem to be, with no visible way back?

That last one causes more frustration than any indexing issue. Detect, suggest, never impose.

One thing worth doing today

Open your site in a private window, add `/es/` or `/en/` to the address by hand, and see what happens.

If nothing changes, or you land on a page that isn't the equivalent, that's the whole problem in one test.

I move to Santa Teresa in September, and multilingual sites are part of what I build. How I work is set out here.