Getting found in two languages at once

The firm had eleven pages competing for variations of the same English phrase and almost nothing in French, in a city where most people search in French first. Google was picking one of the eleven more or less at random, and it was rarely the right one.

Underneath that sat a technical problem. The French pages existed but were served from URLs that no search engine had been told about, with no language markup connecting them to their English equivalents.

We started by consolidating. Eleven overlapping pages became four, each answering one question completely, with the strongest of the old pages redirected into them so nothing that had earned rankings was thrown away.

Then we fixed the bilingual structure properly: parallel URLs, correct language and region markup in both directions, and a language switcher that lands you on the same page rather than the home page. Practice area pages were rewritten to answer the questions people actually type, which are almost never the names of the practice areas.

Finally, structured data for the firm and its locations, and a genuine review flow, because in local legal search the review count moves the ranking more than the copy does.

Organic enquiries roughly tripled between month one and month seven. French traffic went from a rounding error to about forty-five percent of all organic sessions, which is roughly the split of the city.

The firm now ranks in the top three for its two most valuable practice areas in both languages. Nothing here was clever. It was consolidation, correct markup, and writing about what clients are frightened of rather than what lawyers call it.