I ranked #1 by translating my own English site badly

I ranked #1 by translating my own English site badly

Month 1: I had a profitable English site in the standing-desk niche, $2k/mo. Domain on the translated version cost nothing — same domain, subfolder.

Month 2: I machine-translated 20 posts into German and Dutch, lightly edited. Everyone says auto-translation is SEO poison. In these markets, with almost zero local competition, it ranked anyway.

The setback: the German content read like a robot, and a native speaker emailed me, politely horrified, listing errors. Bounce rate on those pages was 78%. People landed and fled.

Month 5: I paid a German freelancer $300 to rewrite the 6 best-performing translated posts properly. Those specific pages went from 78% bounce to 41%, and conversions on them quadrupled.

Month 9: the non-English versions add $900/mo — about 45% more revenue from content I already owned, in markets with a fraction of the competition.

The takeaway: low-competition language markets can rank thin translations, but they won't CONVERT until a native speaker fixes them. Translate broadly to find what gets traffic, then invest human editing only into the pages that prove they earn.