Your property in four languages: where does it appear?

One listing, four domains

You enter your property once and it appears at four addresses: the Dutch, the French, the German and the English one. Each is a separate domain with its own language, its own sitemap and its own place in the results. To Google those are four websites rather than four translation buttons, and they are judged separately too.

All two hundred and twenty-two properties online today have their four descriptions filled in. That is not a coincidence but a condition: without the four texts a property sits on three of the four domains with no content, which would make it unfindable there.

None of those two hundred and twenty-two carries a French text that is word for word the same as the Dutch one. We check that, because a copied text does not read as French and is not treated by Google as a French page either.

The Dutch description runs to roughly 1,300 characters at the median property, with a shortest of 164 and a longest of over 3,000. That is the text the other three build on, so whatever you leave out there is missing four times over. A short source text therefore costs you reach four times over, not once.

The French domain outperforms the Dutch one

Across ninety days the French domain drew 832 clicks on 44,822 impressions, with an average position of 18.9 and 463 pages that have been shown at least once. The Dutch domain came to 754 clicks, 43,576 impressions, position 28.0 and 381 pages.

That is a difference on every axis at once: more clicks, more impressions, nine places higher and eighty-two more pages in view. For a Flemish host who treats the French text as a formality, that is the most important sentence on this page. The domain they check least is the domain that delivers most.

The German domain drew 109 clicks on 11,153 impressions at position 27.1, spread across 328 pages. The English one stayed at 76 clicks and 7,693 impressions at position 34.0 across 187 pages. Those two are considerably smaller, and the English one ranks deepest of all four.

Together that comes to 1,771 clicks on 107,244 impressions. We call those figures exact because they come from a query without a dimension rather than from a truncated list of search terms, where part of the demand quietly falls outside. On a truncated list, an earlier comparison of these two domains came out exactly the other way around.

Why the French domain is ahead

The difference does not come from our translations, because the four domains show the same properties with the same photos and the same prices. It comes from how the two markets search, and the figures show that on a single word.

In French nearly all demand runs through the word gîte. The term gite belgique on its own is worth 793 impressions with 33 clicks at position 11.3, and alongside it variants such as gites en belgique, gite en belgique and gites belgique are each worth hundreds more impressions.

In Dutch that same demand splits apart. Vakantiehuizen belgie reaches 142 impressions at position 11.4, so almost exactly the same place as the French gîte, but with a fifth of the volume. The rest spreads across vakantiewoning, vakantiehuis, vakantiehuisje and their plurals.

For you that does not mean dropping the Dutch. It means the French text of your property is not a side issue, because it serves the market where we currently sit closest to a good position. One place higher there delivers more than three places higher in Dutch.

What that means for your own texts

Do not let your French and German text read like a literal translation of your Dutch brochure. A French-speaking guest is looking for a gîte rather than a vakantiewoning, so that word belongs in there. The same goes for region names, which often read differently in French.

Look at what you write in Dutch as well, because with us that is the source text. The median property uses roughly 1,300 characters; anyone staying below five hundred gives the other three languages little to work with and leaves the fields to do the work.

The German domain is the clearest place to grow. It has 328 pages in view, almost as many as the Dutch one, but draws only 11,153 impressions from them against 43,576. So the pages exist and are still shown too rarely.

And keep in mind that this covers ninety days and 1,771 clicks in total. That is a real figure and it is not a large one. We include it because a host counting on four domains should know how big those four actually are today.

Frequently asked questions

Read next