Be Beauty Academy: one website placing in English, Chinese and Malay

Be Beauty Academy · Vocational training · Kuala Lumpur and Johor Bahru · 6 min read

ClientBe Beauty Academy
IndustryVocational training · Kuala Lumpur and Johor Bahru
Websitebebeautyacademy.my
EZsite productCorporate Edition
Live sinceSeptember 2018

Malaysia does not search in one language. The same course, in the same city, is looked for as beauty academy malaysia, as 医美课程 and as kursus kecantikan, by three groups of people who will never see each other's results page. Most training providers answer one of those three. Be Beauty Academy answers all of them, from one website.

The figures below come from their own Google Search Console, read on 16 October 2026. Be Beauty Academy have agreed to be named.

Who they are

Be Beauty Academy train beauty, aesthetic and permanent-makeup professionals from campuses in Kuala Lumpur and Johor Bahru. Their programmes carry SKM (Sijil Kemahiran Malaysia) levels 1 to 3 through Malaysia's JPK, and they are a registered HRD Corp training provider. That accreditation matters to the story: it means the people searching for them are not browsing, they are choosing a qualification.

They came onto the platform in September 2018 with no website of their own, and they have been on it since — eight years, one site, no rebuild.

Three languages is an architecture decision, not a translation job

The common way to put a Malaysian site into three languages is to bolt a translate widget onto it. That produces text in three languages and one page as far as Google is concerned: one URL, one title, one description, indexed in whatever language the original was written in. The Chinese and Malay versions do not exist in search, because they do not exist as pages.

The site is built the other way round. Each language is its own set of URLs, under /en/, /cn/ and /ms/, and each page carries its own title, its own meta description and its own keywords per language — filled in by the academy, not machine-translated from the English.

Today the sitemap carries 73 English pages, 31 Chinese and 31 Malay, plus their course and gallery listings. Google indexes them as what they are: three sites' worth of answers that happen to share a brand, a login and a bill.

What that is worth, measured

Three searches, one for each language, over the 28 days to 16 October 2026:

Search termLanguageAverage position
skm beauty courseEnglish1.5
医美课程 (aesthetic-medicine course, as typed)Chinese1.9
kursus kecantikanMalay4.3

Three different results pages, three different audiences, one website. A provider with an English-only site is invisible on two of those three, and will never see it happening — because a search you do not appear in leaves no trace in your reports.

Across the whole site, the three months to 16 October 2026 brought 2,340 clicks from 69,200 impressions. And the site is moving in the right direction, which the two windows show plainly:

3 monthsLast 28 days
Average position10.97.5
Average CTR3.4%4.4%

A lesson we learned on this account, at our own expense

The academy told us they were ranking first for beauty academy malaysia. We checked the three-month average, saw 5.2, and told them the claim would not survive scrutiny.

We were wrong, and they were right. Here is the same search term at four settings:

WindowAverage position
3 months, worldwide5.2
3 months, Malaysia only3.9
Last 28 days1.6
Last 7 days1.5

The site had climbed, and the three-month average was holding it down with its own history. Over the same comparison the bare term beauty academy moved from 9.7 to 4.3.

Two things follow from that, and both are useful to anyone reading their own reports:

  • A three-month average answers "where has this been", not "where is this now". On a site that is improving, the long window is the pessimistic one. Pull 28 days and 7 days before you conclude anything.
  • Filter by country. A Malaysian academy ranked 3.9 in Malaysia and 5.2 worldwide is ranked 3.9, because the worldwide figure is diluted by results pages in countries where they do not teach and do not want to.

We are telling this against ourselves deliberately. A case study where the agency is right about everything is not a case study, it is an advertisement.

What it runs on

PlatformEZsite Corporate Edition, live since September 2018
LanguagesEnglish, Chinese and Malay — separate URLs, separate SEO fields, one backend
Who writes itBe Beauty Academy. Courses, news and gallery items are added from the backend.
What we doHosting, the platform, the sitemap, and the per-language SEO fields that make three languages into three indexable sites

If your customers search in more than one language and your website only answers in one, you are not competing in the other two — and nothing in your analytics will tell you so. Send us your website address and we will show you which searches you are currently invisible in.

Search Console figures read on

← All case studies