Nøva Marbella is a property portal for the Costa del Sol: filterable listings, area guides, long- and short-term rentals, and a valuation funnel. It ships in four languages — English as the default, plus Swedish, Dutch and German — with proper reciprocal hreflang between them rather than a client-side translation widget.
That choice is usually argued about on principle. Nine months of data lets us argue about it with numbers instead.
Nine months in
- Impressions
22,417
Impressions
since launch
- Clicks from search
116
Clicks from search
since launch
- Average position
33.9
Average position
all queries
- Indexed and ranking
4 languages
Indexed and ranking
EN · SV · NL · DE
Google Search Console, property sc-domain:novamarbella.com, 26 November 2025 – 29 August 2026. These are early-stage numbers and are presented as such.
Impressions per month
The first three months are almost nothing. That is normal, and it is the part most clients are never shown — a new domain in a competitive category spends its first quarter being crawled, not ranked.
- Nov 256
- Dec 2518
- Jan 2669
- Feb 2682
- Mar 261,347
- Apr 264,469
- May 264,511
- Jun 264,438
- Jul 264,365
- Aug 263,112
The least contested language wins first
Marbella property in English is one of the hardest SERPs in Spain. Portals with a decade of backlinks and six-figure content budgets own it, and the numbers show exactly that: an average position of 44.2 in the United Kingdom and 40.0 in Spain. Page four and page five. Real impressions, almost no clicks.
Swedish is a different market with the same inventory. Average position 19.3 — roughly twice as well placed, on a fraction of the competition. The single best-performing page on the whole site is /sv/marbella-map, the Swedish version of the area map: 2,314 impressions at position 10.9, from searches like “marbella karta” and “karta marbella området”.
Dutch behaves the same way at smaller scale. The Dutch area guides rank for long-tail queries about gated communities and buying guides in specific neighbourhoods — phrasings that have no English equivalent competing for them, because no English-language competitor has bothered.
Performance by market
The same site, the same listings, four very different levels of difficulty.
| Market | Impressions | Clicks | Avg. position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spain | 5,823 | 40 | 40.0 |
| United Kingdom | 5,089 | 16 | 44.2 |
| Sweden | 3,399 | 14 | 19.3 |
| Germany | 633 | 11 | 20.6 |
| Netherlands | 636 | 7 | 21.4 |
| United States | 3,693 | 4 | 34.3 |
What a four-language build actually costs
The work is not four times a one-language site, and it is not free either. What it is, precisely:
One codebase, four URL trees
Every route exists under /sv, /nl and /de as well as the English default, with reciprocal hreflang tags and a shared x-default. No client-side translation widget: a widget shows one page to Google, so three of your four markets never get indexed at all.
Translated content, not translated interface
Buttons and labels are the easy half. The half that ranks is the area guides, the neighbourhood pages and the buying guides — that is where the long-tail queries live, and it is the part that has to be genuinely written in each language.
Four sitemaps' worth of patience
Each language tree gets discovered and indexed on its own schedule. The Swedish pages here started earning impressions before the English ones did, which is not something you can plan for — only something you can build for.
A reason for each language
Swedish, Dutch and German are on this site because the Costa del Sol property market is built on buyers from exactly those countries. A language with no buyers behind it is four times the maintenance for nothing.
Where this site actually stands
116 clicks in nine months is not a success story yet, and calling it one would be dishonest. What the data does show is a site that is fully indexed across four languages, growing from six impressions a month to four thousand, and already competitive in the markets where competition is thinnest.
The English pages need what English pages always need in this category: links and time. The Swedish and Dutch pages need more content of the kind that is already working. Both of those are known, boring, unglamorous jobs — which is the point of measuring in the first place.
What to take from this
- 01A four-language site is not one site translated. It is four search markets with four different levels of competition, and the easiest one usually pays out first.
- 02Use real per-language URLs and reciprocal hreflang. A translation widget leaves three of your four markets unindexed.
- 03Pick languages by where your buyers live, not by how international you want to look.
- 04Expect the first quarter to produce almost nothing. This site's first three months totalled 175 impressions.
Method & sources
All figures come from Google Search Console for the domain property sc-domain:novamarbella.com, pulled through the Search Analytics API on 1 September 2026. The launch window figures cover 26 November 2025 — the first day with recorded impressions — through 29 August 2026. Market and page breakdowns cover the twelve months to 1 September 2026.
Language versions were confirmed directly from the site's hreflang tags at the time of writing: en (x-default), sv, nl and de.
Impressions and clicks describe search visibility only. This page makes no claim about property enquiries, viewings or sales — that data belongs to the client and cannot be verified from a developer's side.