Insight1 min readLaboe Studio
How do you build an English and Chinese website that ranks in both?
Direct answer: Separate URLs, two-way hreflang, a self-referencing canonical on each, and real localisation — not machine translation.
Two languages means two sets of URLs that each stand on their own: a locale route for every page, hreflang pointing both ways, a canonical that points to itself, and copy written for the reader rather than run through a translator. It has to be managed as one system, not two parallel sites.
From our work
Soul Youth carries every content field in both English and Chinese inside one CMS, so the team edits once and both versions stay in sync; the public site ships locale-routed /zh pages with hreflang and structured data across organisation, product, article and FAQ pages. Ruide is the mirror case — English-first for Southeast Asian institutional buyers, fully bilingual, with per-locale metadata and language-matched assets down to the accreditation certificate.
When this matters: Whenever the second language is a real market, not a courtesy. If nobody will maintain the second version, one well-built language beats two half-kept ones.
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