An English and Chinese website is a common request from Melbourne businesses with Chinese-speaking customers: property developers, restaurants, accountants, migration agents, retailers. The build is not hard. What goes wrong is the set-up around it, which decides whether Google shows the Chinese page to a Chinese-speaking searcher or quietly treats it as a duplicate of the English one. This is how we set it up, with the reasoning, so you can check any site you own against it.
Why it matters in Australia
The 2021 Census recorded Mandarin as the most widely spoken language other than English in Australian homes, with Cantonese also in the top five. In Melbourne’s east and south-east those households are a large share of the people searching for a house, a tutor, a dentist or a dinner booking. Many of them search in Chinese, and a site with no Chinese pages is simply absent from those results.
Put the Chinese pages on the same domain
Use a folder, not a separate domain. On this site the Chinese layer lives under /zh/, so the Chinese version of our web design page is the same address with /zh/ in front. One domain means one set of authority signals, one sitemap, one Search Console property and no argument about which site is the real one. Subdomains and separate .cn or .com domains split all of that for no benefit, and a separate domain hosted outside Australia adds latency for the people you are trying to reach.
Tell Google which page is which
Google needs to be told that the English page and the Chinese page are versions of each other. The mechanism is hreflang, and Google’s documentation describes three equivalent ways to declare it: link tags in the page head, HTTP headers, or the XML sitemap. Pick one. The rules that trip people up are these:
- Every page in the pair must list both versions, including itself. A one-way declaration is ignored.
- Use the right codes. Simplified Chinese is zh-Hans; Australian English is en-AU. Underscores and made-up region codes break the tag silently.
- Add an x-default pointing at the page you want shown when neither language matches.
- Set the lang attribute on the html element to match. Google says it does not rely on it to detect language, but browsers, screen readers and translation tools do.
On this site the pairing is stored with each page and the tags are generated from it, so a new page cannot go live half-declared. If your site uses a plugin for languages, check its output once in the page source rather than trusting the settings screen.
Translate the metadata, not just the body
The most common failure we see on a bilingual site is a Chinese page wearing an English title and description. The title is what appears in the search result, and a Chinese searcher reading an English headline will skip it. Every Chinese page needs its own title, meta description, Open Graph tags and image alt text in Chinese, and the structured data on the page should carry a Chinese name and description for the business as well. The same goes for the locale on social sharing tags: zh_CN for the Chinese page, not a copy of the English setting.
Write for the reader, not from the English
A page that is a sentence-by-sentence translation of its English twin reads like one. Chinese-speaking customers ask different questions, weigh different proof and respond to different examples: WeChat as a contact channel, the suburbs they live in, the schools and transport they care about, the way prices and inspections are discussed. Google’s guidance on helpful content is language-neutral, and it rewards pages written for a specific audience over pages produced to fill a matrix. We learned this the slow way on our own Chinese layer, which started as close mirrors of the English pages and is now being rewritten page by page, beginning with the ones Google has already shown to searchers.
Give the Chinese layer a front door
If no English page links to the Chinese pages, Google can only reach them through the sitemap and the hreflang tags, and visitors cannot reach them at all. Put a visible language switch in the header or footer, link the Chinese home page to every Chinese service page, and link Chinese pages to each other the way the English ones do. A hidden language layer is not a strategy, and in the worst case it looks like cloaking.
Measure it separately.
In Search Console, filter queries by the Chinese pages and watch impressions and position for them on their own. In GA4, look at sessions by landing page under /zh/ and at the language setting of the browser. If a Chinese page ranks for an English query, or an English page ranks for a Chinese one, the hreflang pairing is the first thing to check. Our bilingual SEO work starts with exactly this report, and the Chinese marketing side of the studio uses it to decide which pages to write next. The Chinese version of this site is at xcreative.com.au/zh/ if you want to see the structure in place.
Do I need separate en-AU and en versions as well as Chinese?
Usually not. If your English content is the same for every English speaker, one English version tagged en or en-AU plus one Chinese version tagged zh-Hans is enough. Separate English regional versions only make sense when prices, products or legal terms differ by country.
Should the Chinese site be in Simplified or Traditional characters?
Most Chinese-speaking Australians from mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia read Simplified; readers from Hong Kong and Taiwan use Traditional. Simplified reaches the larger group in Melbourne, and you can add a Traditional version later with its own hreflang code, zh-Hant, if the audience warrants it.
Can I use machine translation for the Chinese pages?
You can use it for a first draft, but publishing it unedited produces exactly the mirror-image pages described above, with wrong terminology for your industry and none of the local detail a Chinese reader expects. Have a native speaker who knows your business rewrite the page, and keep the English and Chinese versions as two pieces of writing about the same service rather than one text in two scripts.
