French and Dutch bilingual websites: how they work, what they cost and what goes wrong

In Belgium, going bilingual is not a convenience option; it is a market decision. And the question is almost always framed badly: people ask ‘how much does translation cost?’ when translation is the cheapest of the four cost categories. This decision belongs in the scope of your website project in Belgium.

The decision comes before the spending

An additional language only makes sense if you can handle the entire relationship in it: the first call, quote, follow-up, invoice and dispute. A Dutch-language website that generates enquiries nobody can answer in Dutch creates unhappy customers, which costs more than having no website.

The question is therefore operational rather than linguistic: do you have someone who can do it?

The four actual cost categories

The third category is the one people discover too late. A Flemish searcher does not type a literal translation of what someone in Wallonia searches for. ‘Webbureau’, ‘website laten maken’ and ‘webdesign bureau’ are phrases with their own search volumes and competition. Translating a well-ranked French page does not produce a well-ranked Dutch page.

The URL structure

There are three approaches, and the choice is made for the long term.

• Subdirectories, mysite.be/fr and mysite.be/nl: the simplest and most common option, concentrating all authority on one domain. This is the right choice in almost every case.
• Subdomains, fr.mysite.be and nl.mysite.be: possible, but search engines treat them almost as two websites, so authority is dispersed.
• Two separate domains: reserved for brands with two genuinely separate commercial identities. Expensive and rarely justified.

Hreflang tags and the three mistakes that undermine them

This is what tells Google which version to serve to whom. When implemented badly, it does more than become useless: it leaves the two versions competing with each other.

• Missing reciprocal references. The French page lists the Dutch version, but the Dutch page does not list the French one. Google then ignores the group.
• Invented codes. `be` is not a language; it is a country. The correct values are `fr-BE` and `nl-BE`, or simply `fr` and `nl`.
• Forgetting the fallback page. Without `x-default`, a visitor who matches none of the declared versions has no designated destination.

A practical approach when the budget is tight

Translating the entire website is not compulsory. Three or four pages are enough to establish a presence in another language: home, the main service, a page with evidence of your work and contact.

On one condition: those pages are translated by a person and the tags are correct. Three impeccable pages are worth more than thirty machine-translated ones that Google treats as low-value content and a Flemish reader spots within three lines.

You then expand if enquiries follow. This sequence costs less and fails less often.