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What you translate word for word and what you rewrite because that's not how people search here
You'll know which text on your English website needs to be written straight from real search terms, and which parts you can simply translate well.
By Yodai · Published on September 6, 2026 · Updated on October 12, 2026
Your English site is up, whether it's in a folder, a subdomain, or a separate domain, and both versions reference each other for Google. Now it's time to write it. And that's where a question stops you that sounds simple but isn't: do you take each sentence in Spanish and translate it into English, or do you change something along the way?
If your answer is "I'll just translate it as is," you'll end up with a grammatically perfect English website that nobody visits. Translating a sentence isn't the same as writing the sentence someone actually types into Google when they search in English.
How people who don't speak Spanish actually search
Your service is called "peluquería canina a domicilio." Translated word for word, that's "canine hairdressing home service." It's grammatically fine. Nobody searches for it.
Someone with a dog in the UK types "mobile dog groomer" or "dog groomer near me" into Google. They're not translating your phrase, they're using their own, the one they've used their whole life to ask for the same thing.
Finding it doesn't cost a thing. Switch your browser language to English, set your country to the UK or the US depending on who you're writing for, and type the start of your phrase into the search box. Autocomplete will give you the real phrase. Scroll to the bottom of the results, and the related searches will give you two or three more.
What you translate as is and what you rewrite
The rule doesn't depend on whether the phrase is long or short, or whether it sounds good. It depends on where that phrase lives.
If it's something Google shows someone before they even reach your site, the tab title, the two-line description under it, the big headline on the page, that phrase has to be the one that person actually searches for. That's where you rewrite, starting from English, not from Spanish. If your website doesn't let you change the title and description of each page, ask whoever manages it for you.
If the phrase lives inside the page, after the click, nobody searched for it: it's read by someone who already decided to come in. There you can follow the Spanish text more closely, as long as it still reads like English written by a person and not like a translation.
Notice that the first three rows are exactly what you see in a Google search before clicking into any website: title, description, and headline. The other three are text that only gets read by someone who already clicked. That line is what separates rewriting from translating.
The rest of the site, the paragraphs explaining the service, the footer with your address, the legal notice, doesn't need this kind of work. There, you translate at a normal pace, making sure it reads like natural English, and move on. With the title, description, and headline written from real search terms, your site now competes on equal footing with any local English-speaking business for that customer, as long as Google can index the English version: if your site lives on an address borrowed from the platform you built it with and only the home page gets indexed, you'll need your own domain for that.
Whether that customer sticks around once they click in is another question: the price in pounds and a review in English matter more there than you'd think.
- The tab title and meta description in English are written from the phrase an English customer searches for, not translated from Spanish.
- The big headline (H1) and the service name repeat that same search phrase.
- The rest of the text, body, hours, legal notice, is translated naturally, without needing to repeat any search phrase.
- You know where to look to find out how people who don't speak Spanish actually search: Google's autocomplete in that language and country.
Test yourself
Answer before opening each one. If one gives you trouble, go back to the section that explains it.
1. Your page in Spanish is titled "Reserva tu mesa" and you used the same phrase in the H1. For the English version, do you write "Reserve Your Table," the exact translation, or "Book a Table"?
You use "Book a Table" in the title and the H1, because that's the phrase people actually use when they want to reserve a table in English. "Reserve" is understood too, but check autocomplete and you'll see which one comes up first. Inside the body text of the page, you can use "reserve" wherever it reads better, since it's no longer competing for search there.
2. You have eight customer reviews in Spanish on your homepage. For the English version, you don't have a single real review from an English-speaking customer. Do you translate all eight and post them as is?
You don't translate them. A review translated and signed as if an English-speaking customer wrote it is a fake. Remove that block from the English version until you have real reviews from customers abroad, and add them in as they come.
3. Your hours say "Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 4 to 8 p.m." and you have half a page of cookie policy. Do you spend time figuring out how an English speaker would search for that, the same way you did with the title?
No. Nobody lands on your website searching for your hours or your cookie policy, so you translate those directly and just make sure they read well. Save your time for thinking through what people actually search for when it comes to your title, meta description, and the name of each service, since that's what really determines whether they find you.