Contrary to the common knowledge, not many people actually speak or use English outside some certain islands in Europe.
True — educated, younger people do often speak 3-4 languages, including their mother tongue and English. But that’s not as big a percentage as you’d think. Worse, knowing a language isn’t the same as preferring or even using it.
Having a multilingual website in Europe is a must. Otherwise you switch off a huge part of your potential audience.
1. On average we use just our native language
Or even worse — in most countries it's normal to really not know more than one (or two) languages.
2. European nations are really small
Large proportion of your potential customers are from the neighbouring countries and most probably speak another language. Be inclusive, your market can't possibly end with the borders of your tiny home country.
3. Millions around you don't share your mother tongue
It would be easy to think that in Belgium, "Belgish" is spoken. But no, there is no such thing. Most of the people there speak either French of Flemish, a dialect of Dutch. But there are millions more, who speak the language they brought from home with them when they came to live and work in the heart of Europe. Address more than just the main language of your country.
4. Going English-only is especially bad idea
Outside of UK and Ireland not so many can even speak it not to mention use it for meaningful usage of your website.
5. Never forget Google search results
More than 30% of the visitors on an average website come from search engines. Almost all the searches are done in the native language of the searcher. If your website has no content in their language, they will never even see your site in the results.
How to make a multilingual site then?
The problem is, not many website building tools offer you a decent solution for building beautiful multilingual websites. Most of the tools make you live through considerable amount of weltschmerz to even have more than one language on the same site — not to mention keeping languages parallel and automatically detecting the preferred tongue of the visitors.Voog is the only solution that is built up from scratch with multiple language websites in the focus. Try us out and tell us what you think.
Build a website in multiple languages
By multilingual, I mean that you actually have a language menu that filters out all of the content in only one particular language. For example, a Belgian artist needs to reach out in Dutch (Flemish), French and English so they’d cover just their motherland and send out valuable information to the friendly neighbors all around. The same example goes well for any other local artist in Europe.
Achieving this is super easy with Voog and it doesn’t involve any coding. Instead you can have a basic but informative website up in three languages in less than an hour. You can even copy content from one language to another, skipping the tedious task of re-adding all of your galleries, Youtube videos and music streaming widgets.
Voog has beautiful, mobile-friendly, ready-made designs such as Anchorage waiting for you. It’ll take some extra minutes to fully customize it by adding the best images out of your last few gigs. Trust me, it’s worth it.
Why not just English?
If you're based in Europe, there is a possibility your audience is already speaking multiple languages in your homeland. Use this opportunity to reach out to them.
English is an universal language but people tend to forget that most of us aren't 100% fluent in it, we just manage enough to conveniently get by. To top it off, Google delivers region-based search results and it helps you to stay relevant locally.
Go ahead, and if you need any help with setting up the content or with any specific widgets, check out our integrations page, knowledge base or just let us know about it.
