Building a multilingual website in Morocco
A button that swaps the text does not make a site multilingual. Without its own URL, the second language does not exist to a search engine.
· 7 min read · Noor Studio Agency
The rule that decides everything: one URL per language
This is the most widespread and most expensive mistake. A site that translates its content in JavaScript without changing address has one page as far as a search engine is concerned: the one in its default language. The other version can be perfectly translated — with no URL to index, it has no way of appearing.
The fix is structural, not cosmetic: each language must live at its own address, declare itself canonical, and switching language has to be a navigation.
Declaring the versions to each other
Once the URLs are separate, you still have to tell Google they are two versions of one page rather than two competing pages. That is what hreflang tags do, and they follow strict rules.
- Every page lists itself among its own alternates.
- The relationship is reciprocal. If A names B, B must name A, or the cluster is discarded.
- Every target must be self-canonical. A version that canonicalises to another language cancels the whole thing.
- An x-default tag names the version served to visitors nothing else matches.
Arabic: not merely a translation
Arabic reads right to left, which inverts the entire layout: column order, arrow direction, text alignment, icon placement. That is not a setting, it is a design variant.
On top of that come typography — not every Latin typeface has a coherent Arabic counterpart — and numerals, which can be written two ways. Decide on Arabic before design. Adding it later almost always means redoing the layout.
Translate what matters, not everything
A multilingual site costs to build and costs to maintain: every change is made as many times as there are languages. Plenty of projects exhaust themselves translating an entire blog for an audience that never reads it.
A useful rule: translate the pages that sell first — home, offers, contact, work — then extend based on what the analytics show. A partly translated language that is current beats a complete one that is stale.
And at Noor Studio Agency?
We delivered a trilingual French, English and Arabic site for Luxury Ride Morocco, with text direction handled and clean per-language SEO — and this very site applies exactly the rules described here.
A project to scope?
Thirty minutes is enough to tell you what is worth doing now, what can wait, and what it involves.