How to Add a Google Translate Gadget on Blogger and Make Your Website Multilingual

The benefits of having a multilingual website are many. The most notable of them are better SEO, new customers, better communication, and a big surge in customer satisfaction. It doesn’t matter what your website is about, as long as you target people from more than one country, it must be translated to all relevant languages. It’s a necessary requirement considering the competitive markets of today. You simply have to be the best.

However, translating all your website content ‘by hand’, meaning hiring a professional translation agency to do the job, is very expensive. The good news is that you can use a machine translation gadget from Google with your Blogger website to enable the visitors translate the website automatically. This solution won’t be as sophisticated, accurate, or SEO-effective. But it’s a great place to start on your road to a full-fledged multilingual website.

How to Add a Google Translate Widget on Blogger

Like all Blogger widget installation instructions, this one is very simple:

1. Log into your Blogger account as per usual.
2. Click on the Blog Title.
3. Click on Layout in the left-side menu.
4. Click on Add a Gadget (to the right of the Blog Posts section).
   This will open a pop-up window.
5. Scroll through the list in the pop-up window until you find Translate and click on the “+” to add it.
6. Configure your Translate gadget by choosing the Title and Style.
7. Click Save (highlighted in orange).
8. Enjoy the benefits of having your website translated into any language Google Translate Widget is capable of supporting. That’s100+ languages so far.

Be sure to consider your website’s admin control panel and hosting capabilities when choosing to make a multilingual website. While Google Translate Widget can integrate with nearly anything, and cPanel can administer any kind of website, you’ll need to find the best cPanel hosting. Making your website go global by adding more languages will result in a surge in traffic. You need to have a host that can adjust to prevent your website from crashing. Otherwise, all the possible positive effects of making your pages multilingual will be negated.

How to Use the Change Blog Language Feature on Blogger

If there’s only one language you target, installing Google Translate Widget might not be necessary. Blogger has a built-in translation feature that will allow you to translate the website instantly.
To do this you need to:

1. Log into your Blogger account.
2. Click on the Blog Title.
3. Click on Settings in the same left-side menu mentioned above.
4. Click on Language & Formatting in the yet another menu that’ll pop up right under the Settings.
5. Select the language you need in the drop-down list.
6. Save the new settings (the button is in the top right corner).

That’s all there is to it and the translation will be quick and efficient.

What About Machine Translation and Multilingual SEO?

Machine translation is effective but extremely limited. Therefore, translating the language of your website by using either of these services won’t do you much good SEO-wise. Do not forget that in order to optimize your website in the best manner possible, you need to research keywords relevant for every specific country in its native language. Merely translating the keywords used on your original English pages word-for-word won’t be nearly as good.

This is why the ultimate form of a multilingual website is actually creating several websites, each made or localized by professional translators and optimized by marketers.

This solution is out of the price range for the majority of businesses. However, you can still reap many benefits by simply adding the Google Translate feature to your pages. This will boost customer satisfaction and increase your chances of expanding to new markets.