Local SEO in Montreal: the bilingual problem nobody plans for

Almost every Montreal business we audit has a French version of its site. Most of them are invisible. The pages exist, a human can reach them through the language switcher, and search engines have either never found them or cannot tell what they are for.

Translation is the last step, not the first

The instinct is to write the English site, run it through a translator, and publish. That produces French pages that rank for nothing, because people do not search in translation. They search in habits.

A concrete example from a legal client: the English page targeted employment lawyer Montreal. The direct French translation was competing with a phrase real users almost never type, while the phrase they do type, describing being fired rather than the practice area, had no page at all. Same service, different mental model. Keyword research has to be done natively in both languages or you are guessing in one of them.

Three technical things that are almost always broken

• Language markup is missing or one-directional. Each page needs to declare its own language and point at its counterpart, and the counterpart has to point back. One-way declarations are ignored, which is the single most common fault we find.
• The switcher goes to the home page. Landing on a French page and being thrown to the English home page when you switch is a bounce. It should land you on the same page in the other language.
• Automatic redirects by location. Forcing French on anyone with a Quebec address is a good way to be crawled in one language only, and it annoys the substantial number of people who prefer the other one. Detect, offer, remember the choice. Never force it.

Both languages need equal weight

A French section that is a thin subset of the English site tells search engines it is secondary, and it tells French-speaking visitors the same thing. If a service has four English pages and one French page, that service will not rank in French.

This includes the parts nobody enjoys writing: meta descriptions, image alt text, structured data, form labels and error messages. We have seen otherwise excellent French pages carrying English error text, which is exactly the moment a visitor decides you are not really bilingual.

What it is worth

On the legal project, French went from a rounding error to about forty-five percent of organic sessions inside seven months, which is roughly the linguistic split of the city. Nothing about that was a growth tactic. It was the audience that had always been there and could not find them.

If you are running a single-language site in this market and you are not certain which half you are missing, that is the audit worth doing first. It is usually cheaper than any campaign you were considering.