Why your business in Valais needs a multilingual website

27 August 2026 · 2 min

Valais is one of the few truly bilingual cantons in Switzerland — French in central and Lower Valais, German in Upper Valais (Visp, Brig, Zermatt, Saas-Fee and surroundings). On top of that comes tourism: English, German, Italian guests, and visitors from all over the world, all year round. If your site speaks only one language, a real share of the people who could hire you or buy from you will never properly understand what you offer.

Who actually visits your site in Valais

A business in Stalden or Visp has customers whose first language is German. A business in Sion or Martigny has French-speaking customers. And if you work in tourism, hospitality or retail, you have visitors from abroad all year round. A single-language site forces these people to guess, translate in their head, or simply give up and go to the competitor who already speaks their language.

The real cost of having only one language

It’s not just “fewer visits”. It’s also a matter of trust: a site that speaks your language feels closer, more professional, more made for you. And it’s a matter of SEO — Google shows results in the language of the person searching, so a Portuguese-only site rarely shows up in German or French searches, no matter how good the content is.

Multilingual done well is not Google Translate

Automatic translation solves the rush, but creates errors a local customer notices right away — and that can cost you more credibility than not having the language at all. Multilingual done well means: content reviewed by someone who genuinely speaks the language, with the right tone for each audience; title, description and URLs set up so Google can find each version (the so-called hreflang tag); and a simple language switcher that remembers the visitor’s choice for their next visit.

This very site (prstudio.ch) works this way — in Portuguese, German, French, Italian and English, with each version built for local SEO. It’s the example I use to show my clients how it should be done.

What it costs to add languages

In my “Professional” plan (CHF 4'900), EN/DE/PT multilingual support is already available as an option. For more languages or bigger projects, the cost depends on how much content there is to translate — but the principle stays the same: planning for multiple languages from the start always costs less than adding them later to a site that wasn’t built for it (the same reasoning as in the article on pricing).

Want to know what makes sense for your business? Message me on WhatsApp — the first conversation is always free.