Why a Bilingual Website Is a Smart Investment

More and more companies from Serbia work with clients abroad — IT companies, architecture studios, travel agencies, manufacturers, and even local services in places with many foreign visitors. Yet many of their websites exist only in Serbian, or have an “English version” that is really a machine translation of a single page.

In this article we explain why a serious bilingual version is one of the most cost-effective investments in a website, and how to build it so that both visitors and Google love it.

You reach a market many times larger

Serbian is spoken by around ten million people; English by more than a billion. Even if you don't plan to export, an English version lets you be found by foreigners living in Serbia, tourists, the diaspora and international partners looking for suppliers in the region.

For companies already working internationally, an English website isn't an extra — it's a core sales tool. A foreign client who can't read what you do simply moves on to the next search result.

Trust and a professional impression

A well-translated version sends a clear message: we are serious, used to international cooperation and ready for it. By contrast, a poor translation full of grammatical errors often leaves a worse impression than having no English version at all.

Twice the opportunities in search

Every page in another language is a new chance to appear in search results. Competition for English terms is higher, but for specific services in the region (“architect in Serbia”, “web development studio Serbia”) it is often surprisingly low.

How to build a bilingual website properly

The technical setup decides whether Google understands your language versions or treats them as duplicate content. These are the rules we always follow:

• A separate URL for each language — for example site.com/usluge and site.com/en/services.
• Translated URLs and slugs, not just translated text on the page.
• Hreflang tags that tell Google which page is the equivalent in the other language.
• A correct lang attribute in the HTML of each language version.
• A language switcher that leads to the same page in the other language, not to the homepage.
• No automatic redirects based on location — visitors and search engines must be able to see both versions.
• A sitemap listing both language versions and how they relate.

Translation is not the same as localisation

Machine translation is a good start, but never the finish. Copy should be adapted to the reader: currency, date and phone formats, examples and references that mean something to a foreigner. Keywords should also be researched separately for each language — English speakers don't search using literal translations of Serbian phrases.

Our recommendation is to have the core pages (home, services, contact) translated by a native speaker or professional translator, and to translate the blog gradually, starting with the articles that bring the most traffic.

How much does a bilingual website cost?

If multilingual support is planned from the start, the extra development cost is relatively small — usually 15 to 30% of the website price, plus content translation. Adding a second language to a site that wasn't built for it is far more expensive, because it often means changing the structure, URLs and CMS.

Conclusion

A bilingual website is one of the rare investments that simultaneously expands your market, builds trust and improves search visibility. The key lies in proper technical implementation and quality translation.

The website you're reading right now was built on exactly these principles. If you'd like the same for your business, get in touch.