A multilingual website in Latvia: when do you need LV, EN and RU?

In Latvia, almost every company reaches the point of asking about a second language. Sometimes customers ask for it, sometimes a partner abroad, sometimes it simply feels like “the right thing to do”. Then a little row of flags or an automatic translator appears on the site — and six months later the English texts are out of date, half the Russian sections are missing, and Google still shows the Latvian page to someone who searched in English.

When a second language is genuinely needed

When the customer simply doesn’t read Latvian. That is the only direct reason. If part of your customers in Latvia speak Russian day to day, or people abroad are looking for your service, Latvian text isn’t a barrier they will push through — it’s a page they leave.

When the language comes with revenue. Tourism, real estate, logistics, export, medical and legal services, hospitality — in these industries a second and third language isn’t an addition, it’s part of the core offer.

When credibility requires it. A foreign partner who opens your site before a meeting reads more than the text. A site only in Latvian says the company works in the local market, and sometimes that is the exact opposite of the message you want to send.

And there is the other side. If all your customers are in Latvia and speak Latvian, a second language brings no new customers — it only doubles the content work. An empty or outdated English version leaves a worse impression than an honest single-language site.

A multilingual site is not the same as a translation

An automatic translator changes the text, not the page. The words on screen swap over, but the address, the title and the description stay the same. To search engines and AI tools it is still one Latvian page — the English version doesn’t exist in search, because it has no place of its own on the internet.

On a real multilingual site every language has its own address. Its own page, its own title, its own description, its own image captions. Only then can the English or Russian version appear in search results on its own merit, and only then can you send someone a link to it.

And the content isn’t always identical. Different languages often differ not only in wording but in what needs saying at all: different examples, different legal information, different delivery or payment options. A literal word-for-word translation tends to be the worst option here.

What Google sees on a multilingual site

Every language is a separate page. Google doesn’t index “a page in three languages” — it indexes three pages and judges each one separately. That means each language has its own speed, its own structure and its own rankings.

The language versions have to be linked to each other. A search engine needs a technical signal telling it which page is which language version. Without it Google guesses — and often shows the wrong one: the Latvian page to an English speaker, or the English page to a customer in Riga.

Search terms are not translations. “mājaslapu izstrāde”, “website development” and “разработка сайтов” are three separate searches with completely different competition and different user behaviour. A page that performs well in Latvian does not automatically inherit that result in the other languages.

It works the same way in AI answers. ChatGPT, Google AI overviews and the rest answer in the language they were asked in, and look for sources in that same language. If there is nothing about your service in Russian on your site, you won’t appear in a Russian conversation.

Where multilingual sites most often fall apart

The problem is rarely that the languages are missing. Usually it’s that they exist but don’t work.

The Latvian version lives and grows; the others stay exactly as they were on launch day. Some sections are translated, some aren’t — and a visitor switching language lands on an empty page or gets thrown back to the start. The language switcher goes to the home page instead of the same page in another language. And then there are the things nobody remembers: the contact form, the cookie notice, error messages, automated emails and invoices still speaking Latvian.

None of this is visible from the outside. The site looks multilingual until someone systematically walks through every language from top to bottom.

How we solve this

On the sites we build, languages aren’t an add-on bolted onto a finished site — they are part of the structure from day one. Each language has its own address, its own meta data, correctly linked versions, and a language switcher that stays on the same page. The business site package (from €700) already includes multiple languages, and we do the same for existing sites as part of our website development work.

If you don’t know whether your business really needs a second language, or you already have a site where the languages drifted apart long ago — book a consultation. We’ll look at your situation, tell you which languages will genuinely pay off for you, and find the right solution.