A bilingual site: what to know before you start

A second language pays off when people who don't read Greek are already your customers, or clearly could be. A hotel in Kavala, a producer in Thrace selling olive oil abroad, a wholesaler with customers in other countries: for them, an English version is how those customers find them and come to trust them.

It is harder to justify when every customer is local and Greek-speaking. A bakery in Xanthi or a plumber in Komotini gains more from better Greek pages than from an English copy nobody reads.

A simple test: do you already get emails, calls or Viber messages in English, and can someone answer them? A second language only works if the business behind it can reply, quote and deliver in it.

There are three ways to organise it, and the choice affects SEO, cost and day-to-day work.

• Subfolder (example.gr/en/): one site, one domain, one admin panel, and whatever the domain has earned in search helps both languages. The right choice for most small businesses, and how devebo.com is set up.
• Subdomain (en.example.gr): search engines may treat it more like a separate site. It makes sense when the second language runs on a different system or team.
• Separate domain (example.com alongside example.gr): suits a distinct brand or market with its own prices and shipping, but means two sites to promote from scratch.

Whichever you choose, don't redirect visitors automatically by location or browser language. Give them a clear language switcher that leads to the same page in the other language.

Human or machine translation?

Machine translation, AI tools especially, now gives a decent first draft in seconds: a sensible start for long product lists or specifications.

A draft is not a finished page, though. Someone who knows the language and your trade should read every page before it goes live. Machines miss the terms your customers use, the tone of the business and words that carry legal or commercial weight. Anything with a price or a promise needs a human eye.

What gets forgotten

Pages are only the visible part. Both languages also need:

• Forms: field labels, error messages, the thank-you message and the confirmation email.
• Automatic emails: order confirmations, shipping updates, password resets.
• Invoices and documents: receipts, delivery notes, PDF price lists and catalogues.
• Legal pages: privacy policy, cookie banner, terms of sale, returns policy. A careless translation here can promise something the Greek version doesn't.
• Product data: categories, attributes such as size, colour and packaging, units, shipping method names.
• The small things: menus, footer, buttons, the 404 page, image alt text.

Each language needs its own SEO, not a translated copy of the Greek one.

• Research keywords, don't translate them. A Greek buyer types «καρύδια χονδρική τιμή» (walnuts wholesale price); an importer abroad might type "Greek walnut supplier" rather than the word-for-word version. Decide, too, who your English reader is: British and American visitors search differently ("holiday" or "vacation", "flat" or "apartment").
• Slugs in each language. Greek pages read best with URLs in Latin characters, because Greek letters turn into long strings like %CE%BA when a link is shared. English pages get English words, as in devebo.com's /insights/tachytita-to-proto-vima-toy-seo... and /en/insights/speed-the-first-step-of-seo....
• Separate titles and descriptions. Every page needs its own title and meta description in each language, written around that language's searches.
• hreflang. A small tag on each page that tells search engines which language the page is in and where its equivalent lives. Each version must point to the other and to itself; a one-way link is ignored. Multilingual plugins generate it, but check it after launch.

This is the part you rarely hear about in a quote. Setting up the second language happens once; keeping it current never stops. Every change happens twice: a new product, a price change, summer hours, a new article.

The usual failure is a quiet one. The English version launches, then falls behind: last year's prices, old opening hours, a "coming soon" page. An outdated English page can do more harm than none, because the foreign customer has no Greek version to check it against.

A few habits keep the cost reasonable:

• Translate what the foreign customer needs, not everything.
• Keep shared data in one place. Product codes, stock and photos should change once and appear in both languages.
• Decide who translates and when, so every Greek change has someone responsible for its English counterpart.
• Measure each language separately. Search Console can filter the pages under /en/; if English brings neither visits nor enquiries, scale it back.

carpebo.com, the bilingual B2B catalogue we designed and developed for a nut wholesaler in Xanthi, works this way. One product catalogue serves both languages, hreflang connects the Greek and English pages, and the English catalogue is smaller than the Greek one. Two languages don't have to mean two identical sites.

Treat the second language as ongoing care, not something that ends at launch. That is the thinking behind the fourth step of our process: watching what brings visits and what brings customers, month after month.

Isn't a "Translate" button enough?

No. A translation widget changes the text in the visitor's browser, so the translated pages don't exist for search engines and bring in no searches in the second language. You also have no control over what the translation says.

Can we start in Greek and add English later?

Yes, if the site is set up for it from the start: a system that supports languages and URLs with room for /en/. Adding a language to a site not planned for one usually means reworking menus, forms and URLs. Greek and English support is part of the WordPress and WooCommerce websites we set up.

Will the two versions count as duplicate content?

No. A properly translated page is a different page in a different language, and hreflang tells search engines the two are equivalents. Problems start when the "English" page still contains Greek text, or two same-language URLs show the same content.