A website that wins customers abroad

Make the site exist in their language as real, indexable pages, so it can appear in the searches they actually run; make sure the whole page is translated rather than just the headline; and be able to answer an enquiry in their language when it arrives. Advertising into a market whose landing page they cannot read is the expensive way round, and it is what most businesses try first.

Use evidence you already have rather than a market-size table. Your analytics show which countries visitors come from now, and your enquiry inbox shows who is already trying to reach you. Start with two or three of those, and add more once one of them proves itself. Adding a language later costs a plan change, not a project.

Almost never. A separate site per market means a second content system, a second publishing routine, and a domain that starts with no search authority at all. Serving each language as a path on your existing domain means every language inherits the authority you have already built. A separate site is justified when the offering itself differs — different products, different prices, a different legal entity.

The realistic risk is not a comic mistranslation, it is flat wording in a market where the competition sounds local. The way to manage it is to publish everything automatically, then read your most important pages and correct the phrasing you do not like — corrections are permanent — and pin your brand and product names in the glossary so they are never translated at all.

Pages have to be crawled and indexed before they can rank, so this is measured in weeks and months rather than days, exactly as it was for your original language. What you can see immediately is whether existing international visitors behave differently once the site is readable to them.

To launch, yes — setup takes about a minute and needs no developer and no translator. What you cannot avoid forever is a person for the market that works out. The point of doing it this way is that you find out which market that is before you commit the salary.