When a Montreal-based professional services firm came to us, they had a single English website and an untapped French-Canadian market right in their own city. By the time we finished, they were ranking in English, French, and Spanish — and their organic traffic had grown 140% in nine months.
hreflang Done Right
Multilingual SEO lives and dies by hreflang implementation. Get it wrong and you end up with your French pages cannibalizing your English rankings. The correct implementation requires a complete hreflang tag set on every page — every language version must reference all other language versions using the correct ISO codes (fr-CA, en-CA, es-MX, etc.).
Localize, Don't Just Translate
The biggest mistake in multilingual content is treating translation as a content strategy. Each language version needs to be written for its specific audience and their specific search intent. Canadian French users search differently than European French users. We worked with professional translators who are also native speakers in the target markets, briefed on the SEO keyword targets for each language.
Technical Architecture
We implemented the multilingual site on Drupal with subdirectory structure (/en/, /fr/, /es/) rather than subdomains. For most businesses, this consolidates domain authority and simplifies link building. The exception is if you need the SEO benefit of a country-code TLD (.ca, .fr, .es).
The Results
Nine months after launch: English organic traffic up 60%, French organic traffic up 220% from a low baseline, Spanish organic traffic established from zero. Total organic sessions up 140%. The French market, which they had essentially ignored for years, is now their fastest-growing revenue channel.
