Bilingual, not translated: what your guests actually type

Your December guests aren't on the island yet. They're in New York, in Boston, in Paris, on their phones — and half of them are searching in a language your website doesn't speak. If you only exist in one, you don't rank lower for the other half. You're not in that race at all.

Plenty of businesses across St Martin, Sint Maarten and St Barts know this, and have handled it by dropping a translate button at the top of the page. It's the five-minute fix. It's also the one that doesn't do the job.

A translate widget creates no pages

Google doesn't index languages, it indexes addresses. A translation widget rewrites the text inside the visitor's browser, after the page has loaded. The address never changes. So the number of French pages that widget adds to Google's index is zero — and the same is true in the other direction.

To be fair: for someone already on your site, the widget helps. It's a courtesy to a visitor who made it to you. It simply has no effect on the one who hasn't found you yet — and that's the one you're paying to reach.

The test takes ten seconds. Switch your site's language and look at the address bar. If it hasn't moved, that second language doesn't exist as far as a search engine is concerned.

What they type isn't a translation of what you write

Nobody on a US keyboard types "Saint-Barthélemy" with the accent and the hyphen. They type St Barts. And depending on the side of the island and the airport code, they type Sint Maarten, St Maarten or St Martin. Your French-speaking guests, meanwhile, are typing location villa Saint-Barthélemy and restaurant Grand-Case — with the accents, and with words no dictionary would map one-to-one from yours.

The same gap runs through everything you sell:

• villa rental on one side, "location de villa" on the other — never "villa renting";
• private chef rather than the literal "chef at home";
• boat charter or day sail, depending on what you actually run;
• airport transfer, with SXM written into the page, because that code is what people search.

Word-for-word translation produces grammatically correct sentences containing none of the phrases anyone actually types. Hence the rule we apply to every site we build: the second language gets written, not translated. Headlines, meta descriptions, section titles, button labels — in your customers' words, not yours run through a translator.

Two addresses, tied together

Google's recommended setup is also the simplest: one address per language. /en/villas on one side, /fr/villas on the other. Each page then declares where its counterpart lives, with three lines in the head:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/en/villas" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://example.com/fr/villas" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/en/villas" />

That's hreflang. It keeps your two pages from being read as duplicates competing with each other, and it tells Google which version to serve to whom. The x-default is what gets shown when a visitor's language matches neither — on these islands, English is almost always the right answer there.

Never force a language based on country

A lot of sites detect the IP address and redirect on the spot. Bad idea, twice over. A French speaker travelling through Miami gets locked into English with no obvious way back. More importantly, Google's crawlers hit the web largely from the United States: if your site funnels them straight to English every time, your French pages may never be seen at all.

The rule fits in one line: offer, don't redirect. A visible language switch in the header, and the visitor's choice remembered.

Where to start

Not everything needs to be bilingual on day one. In order: the home page, your offer and prices, the booking or contact page, and the practical details — how to get there, opening hours, where to park. The rest, the journal and the "our story" page, can wait.

Two classic omissions will undo the rest of the work, though: the contact form left in one language, and the automatic confirmation email. A guest who fills in a flawless English form and receives a confirmation in French genuinely wonders whether the booking went through. Same goes for your Google Business Profile — reply to reviews in both languages. It's often the first text about you that a future guest ever reads.

We won't promise you the top spot for St Barts villa rental. We never promise a position on Google. What is checkable: genuinely indexable pages in both languages, valid hreflang, and queries in both showing up in your Search Console. Measurable, not promised.

Studio Lagon builds bilingual websites, written in both languages, for St Martin and St Barts — see the packages and pricing, or have your current site's second language checked through the contact form.