Let's say you run a small company in Guangzhou selling packaging machinery, and a distributor in Chile just asked if you have a Spanish version of your website. You do not. This guide is for that exact moment — setting up a multilingual site without a technical background, in plain language.
Step 1: Decide What Gets Translated
Not everything needs translating on day one. Start with your homepage, your product category pages, and one contact page. That's enough to prove you're serious to a buyer in another country. Translate the blog later; nobody is reading your blog in Spanish yet.
Step 2: Understand the URL Question
You have three options: subdomain (es.yourcompany.com), subfolder (yourcompany.com/es/), or separate domain (yourcompany.es). For most small companies, subfolders win. They keep all your authority on one domain, they're easy for Google to understand, and you don't have to buy and maintain a second domain. Unless you have a strong reason — like a local team that wants its own site — pick subfolders and move on.
Step 3: Don't Use Machine-Only Translation
Machine translation is fine as a first draft. It is not fine as the final text of a sales page. A native speaker reading "we are proud to present our high quality products" in badly-translated Spanish is not impressed — they're deciding whether you're a scam. If you can't afford a human translator yet, at minimum have a native speaker review the homepage and the contact page. Those two pages carry your reputation.
Step 4: Set Up the Technical Bits Once
You need three things and they're all small: a language switcher visible on every page, correct hreflang tags so Google shows the right version to the right country, and translated meta titles and descriptions (not just translated page text — the title that shows in search results matters most).
Step 5: Launch, Then Listen
Publish the Spanish pages, wait two weeks, then check two numbers: how many visits the Spanish pages get from Chile specifically, and whether any inquiries arrive in Spanish. If visits come but inquiries don't, the problem is usually trust — add a local phone number or a WhatsApp button. If neither comes, the problem is usually discovery — you may need a local partner or directory listings to get noticed in a new market.
One site, two languages, one afternoon of setup. That's the whole job — the rest is listening and adjusting.
