Is a translation plugin enough for a tourism business?

Guests search in their own language

For anyone running a guesthouse, holiday apartments or a boat tour, foreign guests are often the most valuable customers. They do not search in Turkish. They search in their own language, for something like "boutique hotel Kaş" or "Bootstour Kemer".

This is where it matters whether your site really exists in that language.

A translate button versus a multilingual site

Most ready-made translate buttons translate the text in the visitor's browser, after the page has loaded. If a guest has already reached your site, they can read it in their language. But that version has no address of its own, so a search in German does not bring up a German page of yours.

On a real multilingual site every language has its own address: yoursite.com/en/, yoursite.com/de/ and so on. Google sees each of these pages separately and knows which page is the equivalent of which.

Then there is quality. Machine translation can get a room type, a dish on the menu or a cancellation policy wrong. When a guest notices, they think twice before filling in the booking form.

Two checks you can do yourself

• Does the address change? If the address in the browser bar changes when you switch your site to English, that language has its own page. If it stays the same, the translation is most likely happening only in the browser.
• Who wrote the text? Was the English text written by a person or translated by a machine? Asking a foreign guest to read one of your room descriptions is the quickest test.

Some plugins do create a separate address for each language. Then the only question left is the quality of the translation.

How we handle it

Multilingual structure is part of our website work. On the sites we build, each language lives at its own address and is declared to search engines as the equivalent of the others. The site you are reading is built the same way: the Turkish and English versions each have their own address.

The text is written directly in that language, because the questions a guest asks can differ from one language to another. The domain and every account are registered in your name and can be handed over whenever you ask. We work remotely, so this applies equally to a business run from abroad.