A translate button makes your site readable in Spanish. It does not make you findable in Spanish.

If people call your office and open in Spanish, this is already your question, and somebody has probably already answered it by putting a translate button in the corner of the site.

That button solves a real problem. It solves the wrong one.

Readable and findable are different jobs

A widget helps somebody who is already looking at your page. It does nothing whatsoever for the person typing a Spanish search into their phone at eight in the morning, because that person never reaches your page to press it.

Those are two separate problems and the second one is where the work is.

Why the widget approach disappears

Google is direct about this in its own guidance for multilingual sites.

It recommends using different URLs for each language version of a page, rather than using cookies or browser settings to change the language on the page. And it warns that if you dynamically change content or reroute people based on language settings, Google might not find and crawl all your variations.

Read that as a business sentence rather than a technical one. The Spanish version you paid for may not exist in search results at all. It exists for people who already found you, which is the group that needed it least.

Half a translation is its own problem

The other common version is a site where the menu and the footer are in Spanish and everything that matters is not.

Google's guidance covers this too. It asks for a single language for content and navigation on each page, and says to avoid side-by-side translations. It also notes that translating only the boilerplate while the bulk of the content stays in one language can produce a poor experience, with the same content turning up repeatedly in results wearing different boilerplate.

And the deciding factor is not what you intended. Google uses the visible content of the page to determine its language, so a page that is ninety percent English is an English page with a Spanish hat on.

What we are not claiming

You will read that machine translation is against the rules. We checked, and it is not stated anywhere we could find.

Google's spam policies do not mention machine or automated translation, and the multilingual guidance does not address translation quality either. So the case against a bolted-on widget rests on the crawling problem above, plus a business risk that has nothing to do with search.

That risk is specific. An automatically translated warranty sentence, or a line about what is included in a price, is a commitment you have not read sitting on your own website. It is the same category of exposure as letting software agree to something on your behalf, and it is worth a human reading the pages where money and promises appear.

The part that is not a website decision

Here is the question that decides whether any of this is worth doing.

Who answers when that person calls?

A Spanish landing page that ranks, converts, and delivers a caller to a phone line where nobody can help them is worse than having no Spanish page at all. You have spent money to create a moment of embarrassment for somebody who was ready to hire you, and they will remember it more clearly than they would have remembered your absence.

So the sequence runs the other way round from how it usually gets sold. Sort out who takes the call, what the quote looks like, and who follows up. Then build the pages that send people to them.

Where to start if you are not doing all of it

You do not need the whole site.

Take the one or two services you most want to sell, put a properly written Spanish version of each on its own URL, and make sure the route to contact you works end to end in that language. That is a small piece of work with a real edge attached, because most of your competitors have a translate button and are wondering why it did nothing.

If you serve Spanish-speaking customers in Houston and want the search half and the operations half planned together, book a strategy call. Doing one without the other is where the money goes.