A bilingual website is not a switch in the header but two full versions with separate addresses, their own headings and their own search queries. For a company in Uzbekistan the working pair is Uzbek and Russian: each version lives at its own URL, is linked to the other with hreflang and is translated by a person, not by an auto-translate plugin.
Key takeaways
If you sell inside Uzbekistan, you need an Uzbek version: it is the language the overwhelming majority of the country speaks. The Russian version stays as well — it brings in the business audience of Tashkent, partners across the CIS and all search traffic in Russian.
There is no choice to make between the languages: the versions serve different groups of readers, and demand rarely overlaps. The real question is which version is primary, which one you start with and how you split the budget for copy.
Signs that it is time for an Uzbek version:
For a new site, choose Latin script. Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 61 of 10 February 2021 approved the road map for the full transition to the Latin-based Uzbek alphabet: official websites were to move to Latin script by December 2022, and from 1 January 2023 state bodies and organisations keep their paperwork in it. The requirement is addressed to the public sector, but it sets the direction for the whole market.
Cyrillic Uzbek has not disappeared, though: part of the audience is used to it, and search queries mix both scripts — we covered this in our piece on whether SEO still matters when AI answers the questions. A third version is built only when analytics show that demand, and it is marked with a script code rather than treated as a separate language.
Tip Do not bolt a transliterator onto a single version. Mechanically recoding Latin into Cyrillic gives you the same text at the same address: for search engines it is one page, and for the reader it is a button that changes nothing in substance.
The most common option, and the cheapest to maintain, is subdirectories such as site.com/ru/ and site.com/uz/. Google reviews three URL structures and notes the drawbacks of each. Here is how they look for a company in Uzbekistan.
| Criterion | Subdirectory: site.com/uz/ | Subdomain: uz.site.com | Separate domain: site.uz |
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup | Simplest: one host, one certificate | Simple, but needs its own host and certificate | Costlier: domain, hosting, mail, analytics |
| Country signal | The URL shows the language, not the country | Blurred: “uz” reads as both a language and a country | The clearest country signal |
| Maintenance | Low: same server, same build | Medium: versions split across hosts | High: effectively two websites |
| Separating versions | Hard to hand one version to a separate team | Easy to split across servers and teams | Complete separation |
| When to choose | One company’s site in two or three languages | A version with its own team or its own server | A separate brand or a separate market |
What you should not do is tell versions apart with a parameter such as site.com/?lang=uz. Google marks this option as not recommended: the versions are poorly separated by URL, and the visitor cannot tell where they have landed. A distinct address for each version is a hard requirement, otherwise search engines see one document instead of two.
The versions are tied together by hreflang: it tells search engines that this is one piece of content in different languages and helps serve the right version to the right person. Google describes three equivalent methods of markup — link elements in the head, the Link HTTP header and the sitemap. Picking one is enough.
It should not. Google advises against redirecting people between language versions automatically and against adapting content by IP address: such redirects stop both people and crawlers from seeing all versions of the site. The language is picked through a link in the switcher, and the page address changes with it.
Important Googlebot crawls mostly from the United States and does not send the Accept-Language header. If a version is served by browser language or by cookie at the same address, some of your pages will simply never reach the index.
Everything the customer reads has to be translated, not just the page copy. The most common omission is system screens and emails: the site is in Uzbek, but the order confirmation arrives in Russian.
Product names, trademarks and logos may stay in the original language. Everything else a person reads has to be in the language of the version: a mixed page looks unfinished and answers the query less well.
Advertising in Uzbekistan is distributed in the state language — that is article 6 of advertising law No. ZRU-776 of 7 June 2022, which took effect on 9 September 2022. For a website this leads to a simple conclusion: Uzbek landing pages have to exist before you launch a campaign.
The content of an advertisement may be duplicated in translation, but under conditions. The translation must not distort the meaning of the text in the state language, its font is smaller than the main one, in outdoor advertising the translation is placed horizontally below the main text and takes up no more than 40% of the area, and on television, on radio and in print the translated advertising does not exceed 20% of the daily volume — the exact wording is in the law.
People search for the same product in Russian and in Uzbek using different words, and demand in these two groups rarely coincides. That is why keywords are researched separately for each language and the structure of a version is built around its own list — the same way we described it for a company’s corporate website.
The second reason is typography. In Latin Uzbek, o‘ and g‘ are written with the ‘ sign, and the tutuq belgisi with the ’ sign. Text with the correct signs reads as written by a native speaker; text with apostrophes from the English keyboard reads as machine translation.
The price depends on the type of site, not on the number of languages. In our website development price list, a landing page is from 1 200 $, a company business-card site from 1 900 $, and support after launch from 250 $ a month.
A second language version adds more than translation to the estimate — it adds work that is easy to underestimate. We broke the estimate down in detail in our article on how much a website costs in Tashkent.
Most problems with bilingual sites come not from the translation but from how the versions are built. Here is what we see most often when we take over an existing site for support.
Mistake Handing the translation to a manager over the weekend and publishing it without proofreading. Fixing Uzbek copy afterwards costs more than ordering a native-speaker translation from the start: the corrections have to go into the pages, the emails and the markup alike.
Syntra Systems builds a bilingual site as one project with two sets of copy. We research keywords separately for Russian and Uzbek, agree the structure of both versions before layout, give translation to native speakers and run it through proofreading, and set up hreflang markup and the sitemap before launch rather than after the first indexing problems.
After that the site keeps living: we make sure new pages go out in both versions at once, and keep emails, forms and legal pages in the same state in both languages. If you already have a site in one language, we start with an audit: what to translate, what to rewrite and how to split the addresses without losing rankings.
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Tell us what you need, and we will estimate the timeline and cost and suggest a solution.
Start with the language your enquiries already come in, but build the addresses for the second version into the site from day one: the subdirectory, the hreflang markup and the switcher. Then the second version is added as copy rather than as a rebuild.
As a draft it works, as published copy it does not. Machine translation garbles business wording and puts apostrophes where the ‘ and ’ signs belong, which instantly marks the text as unread. The minimum before publishing is proofreading by a native speaker.
For a company that works inside the country, the working pair is Uzbek and Russian. An English version is added when there are foreign partners, exports or hiring outside Uzbekistan. Every new version means not only translation but also its own emails, legal pages and support.
A third version is launched only when the demand shows up in analytics and webmaster accounts. Technically it is marked with a script code — uz-Cyrl alongside uz-Latn — rather than as a separate language, otherwise the hreflang set is assembled incorrectly.
For one company with two languages it is an extra expense: a separate domain needs its own infrastructure and targets a single country only. A subdirectory such as site.com/uz/ is easier to maintain and solves the same task.
Open the source of each version and make sure it lists both itself and all the other versions, and that each of them links back. Then look at Google Search Console reports: the pages should be indexed at their own addresses, with no versions merged together.
Yes, these are the pages a customer reads before paying and sending their data. They are translated along with the rest of the site and kept in sync: if you edit the Russian wording, edit the Uzbek one too, otherwise the versions start to contradict each other.
Sources
Cover photo: Fauzi Ahmad, Pexels
