If you make parts in Poland, Czechia, Croatia or Slovakia and sell them to machine builders in Germany, you already know that the buyer’s language matters. The purchasing manager in Stuttgart may read English, but he searches in German.
That is why more and more manufacturers build their websites in two or three languages. It signals that you are serious about that market, and it is the only way to show up for the searches buyers actually type.
But a multilingual website that is translated or set up badly can do more harm than good: the German pages never rank, the English pages compete with them, and Google shows the wrong language to the wrong buyer.
We run our own site in English, Polish and Czech, and we have set up multilingual sites for manufacturing clients selling into DACH. The same ten mistakes come up again and again. Here they are, and how to avoid them.
Table of Contents
1. Translating Your Keywords Instead of Researching Them
The most common mistake is to take the English keyword list, translate it word for word, and assume German buyers search the same way.
They don’t. The German search volumes are not translations of the English ones; they are a different market with its own vocabulary. Here is what Ahrefs shows for Germany:
| English term (searched in Germany) | Searches / month | KD | German term | Searches / month | KD |
| laser cutting service | 100 | 40 | Laserschneiden | 1,000 | 0 |
| sheet metal fabrication | 150 | 68 | Blechbearbeitung | 800 | 22 |
| cnc machining services | 100 | 81 | CNC Fräsen | 800 | 1 |
The pattern is the same for every process: the German term has five to ten times the volume and a fraction of the competition, because the English terms in Germany are dominated by international platforms.
Even when buyers in two countries use similar queries, resist word-for-word translation. “Contract manufacturing” becomes “Lohnfertigung” in Germany, and nobody there searches for “Vertragsfertigung”.
Do the keyword research separately for each language and country, with a native speaker who knows the industry checking the terms. Our keyword research process for manufacturers works the same way in German, Polish or Czech; only the seed terms change.
2. Machine-Translating Technical Content Without an Engineer
Machine translation has become good enough that many manufacturers run their service pages through it and publish the result. For a technical audience, that is dangerous.
A German engineer reading “Blechverarbeitung” where the industry says “Blechbearbeitung”, or “Toleranz von 0.1 mm” where German uses a comma (“0,1 mm”), or a tolerance table that lost its plus-minus signs in translation, does not think “small translation error”. He thinks “this supplier does not know what they are doing”.
The fix is not to avoid machine translation, but to treat the output as a draft. Have a native-speaking engineer or a technical translator check the terminology, the standards (DIN and EN designations), the units and the decimal separators, and the material names (S355J2 is S355J2 everywhere, but “stainless steel” is “Edelstahl” and “1.4301” is what German buyers actually search for).
Google also treats pages that are obviously auto-translated as low-quality content. Pages an engineer would trust are pages Google will rank.
3. Not Localising the URLs of Translated Pages
Many sites deliver decent translations but serve them at the same URL as the original, or at a URL that still carries the English slug.
Google wants one language per URL. Each language version needs its own address, and that address should use the local keyword:
- example.com/laser-cutting/
- example.com/de/laserschneiden/
- example.com/pl/ciecie-laserowe/
Not example.com/de/laser-cutting/, and certainly not example.com/laser-cutting/?lang=de.
For a job shop, a language subfolder (/de/) on your existing domain is almost always the right structure. A separate .de domain looks impressive but starts with zero authority and splits your link profile; a subfolder inherits the authority of the main site from day one. Reserve the country domain for the day you have a German subsidiary with its own address.
4. Badly Implemented hreflang
The hreflang attribute tells search engines which pages are translations of each other, so that the German version appears on google.de and the Polish version on google.pl.
Every translated page should carry a reference to itself and to all its other language versions. The common mistakes: pointing to the homepage of the other language instead of the exact translated page, using wrong codes, and forgetting the self-reference.
Good implementation
example.com/laser-cutting/ points to example.com/de/laserschneiden/ with hreflang=”de”, to example.com/pl/ciecie-laserowe/ with hreflang=”pl”, and to itself with hreflang=”en”. Each of the other pages carries the same set.
Poor implementation
example.com/laser-cutting/ points to example.com/de/ (the German homepage), or the tags exist on the English page but not on the German one.
The codes follow ISO: language (“de”) optionally plus country (“de-AT” for German-speaking Austria, “de-CH” for Switzerland). “en-GB” is correct for the United Kingdom; “en-UK” is not a valid code and is ignored. Add an x-default tag pointing to the page you want shown to everyone whose language you don’t cover, usually the English version.
If your site runs on WordPress with Polylang or WPML, the hreflang tags are generated automatically once the translations are linked to each other. The mistake then is not linking them: a German service page created as a standalone page instead of as the translation of the English one gets no hreflang at all. Check a few pages with an hreflang validator after every batch of translations.
5. Mixing hreflang With Canonical Tags
Hreflang is for pages with the same content in different languages. Canonical tags solve a different problem: duplicate content in the same language, where you tell Google which copy to index.
Never point the canonical of a translated page to the original language. It tells Google to ignore the German page, which is the opposite of what you want.
Good: example.com/de/laserschneiden/ has a canonical pointing to itself. Poor: example.com/de/laserschneiden/ has a canonical pointing to example.com/laser-cutting/.
The reverse mistake is using hreflang to fix duplicate content between two English pages. That is not what it is for.
6. Redirecting Visitors Automatically by IP or Browser Language
Some sites detect the visitor’s country or browser language and redirect them to “their” version automatically. It feels helpful; it isn’t.
Googlebot crawls mostly from the United States, so an IP redirect can keep it from ever seeing your German pages. And in manufacturing the assumption behind the redirect is often wrong: the German OEM’s purchasing office in Poland, the Austrian engineer with an English-language laptop, the Swiss buyer who wants the German page but sits behind a corporate proxy in Ireland.
Show the visitor the page they asked for, offer the other languages clearly, and let them choose. If you must keep an automatic redirect, make sure Googlebot can reach every version and set the x-default tag so Google knows which one is the fallback.
7. Hiding Translations With noindex or robots.txt
Some manufacturers hide their translated pages from Google out of fear of duplicate content. They block the /de/ folder in robots.txt or add a noindex tag to every translation.
The fear is unfounded. A German page and an English page with the same content are not duplicates; they are translations, and with hreflang in place Google treats them as exactly that. Hiding them simply guarantees that the German buyer never finds you.
The only translations you should keep out of the index are raw machine translations you have not had checked yet. Publish them as noindex if you must, fix them, then let Google in.
8. Poor Cross-Linking Between Language Versions
A manufacturing site in three languages quickly reaches a hundred pages, and it is easy to lose track of which page links to which translation.
Every translated page must link to its counterparts, page to page. The German laser cutting page links to the English laser cutting page, not to the English homepage. A Polish buyer who lands on your German page and switches language expects the same page in Polish, and leaves if he gets the homepage instead.
Use text for the language switcher, not flags. Flags stand for countries, and German is spoken in three of your target countries. Write the language names in their own language: “Deutsch”, “Polski”, “Čeština”, not “German”, “Polish”, “Czech”.
And make sure the switcher is on every service page and every article, not just in the footer of the homepage.
9. Optimising Only for google.com
Google dominates every EU market, so a manufacturer does not need to worry about Baidu or Yandex. But “Google” is not one thing.
Your German page competes on google.de, google.at and google.ch, with different competitors and different volumes in each. Set up a separate Google Search Console property or filter per country and language, so you can see how the German pages perform in Austria versus Germany, and track the keywords per country.
Bing deserves a look in Germany, where it has a noticeable share on corporate desktops because it ships as the default in many company environments; Bing Webmaster Tools is free and takes an afternoon. And AI assistants increasingly answer supplier questions in the buyer’s language, drawing on the same well-structured pages Google ranks.
Beyond search engines, each market has its own industrial directories where buyers look: wlw (Wer liefert was) and the German edition of Europages for DACH, Kompass, and the national portals in Poland and Czechia. A complete, keyword-rich profile in the local language on each of them brings both buyers and links.
Which brings us to authority. Sites that build links only to their English pages rarely rank the German ones. Get links in the target market: trade associations and their member directories, regional business portals, the trade press of the industries you serve, supplier listings of the machine builders you already work with. A locally relevant technical article, in German, about a German customer’s project, earns the kind of link a translated press release never will.
10. Giving the Translated Version a Second-Class Experience
When a German buyer clicks “Deutsch”, he expects the same website: the same service pages, the same specifications, the same RFQ form, the same reference projects.
What he often gets is a translated homepage and an “About us” page, with the capability pages, the design guides and the case studies still in English, the RFQ form untranslated, and the certificates as English-only PDFs.
A second-class German version tells the buyer exactly how the cooperation will go: fine at the start, English when it gets technical.
Translate the pages that produce RFQs first: service and capability pages, the RFQ form and its confirmation email, the certification page, and the two or three reference projects most relevant to that market. Add what a German buyer needs to decide: delivery times to Germany, Incoterms, a German-speaking contact person with a name and a phone number, and, ideally, a reference from a German customer.
Only then translate the blog, and translate the articles that bring traffic, not all of them. Our guide to on-page SEO for manufacturing websites applies to every language version; the German page needs its own title tag, its own meta description and its own alt texts, not a translation of the English ones.
Conclusion
Multilingual SEO for a manufacturer selling into DACH and the EU is not a translation project. It is a separate keyword research, a technical review by someone who speaks the buyer’s language, a correct hreflang setup, and a German version that is as complete as the original.
Done well, it puts a Polish or Croatian job shop in front of German purchasing managers at the moment they search for “Laserschneiden Lohnfertigung” (contract laser cutting), with a page that answers in their language. Done badly, it produces a hundred pages nobody finds.
In other words: if you are not going to do it right, don’t do it at all. And if you want to do it right, see how we approach SEO for metalworking companies or get in touch.
