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Montréal · SEO
Most SEO done for Montréal businesses is English-first work with a French version bolted on afterward, and it ranks accordingly. Your customers search in French, in the words they actually use, and a translated page written from an English original rarely contains those words. Building French first fixes it, and the English version gets better too.
Montréal · Québec · serving the Greater Montréal
Montréal search market
A page translated from English contains the French words for English search terms, which is not the same thing as the words Québec customers type. The vocabulary diverges constantly, in trades, in law, in food, in medicine. A site built French first is written in the search terms from the start rather than reverse-engineered into them.
The structural half matters just as much. Two languages need correct hreflang so search engines serve the right version to the right person, and a translate widget provides none of that. Widgets produce one indexable page and a lot of content search engines never see.
Loi 96 sits over all of it. French cannot be an afterthought for a business operating in Québec, which means the French version needs to be at least as complete and as prominent as any other. Building French first means that question is already answered rather than retrofitted under pressure.
How it works
Full scope on the seo page.
Every public page graded against what search engines actually read: the title, the heading, the depth of the copy, the internal links, the schema, and the page speed. The audit becomes the punch list, and you get it in writing before anyone talks about a fee.
Stuffing five terms into one page weakens all five. Each page gets one honest target it can win, drawn from the language real customers use, which is rarely the language the industry uses about itself.
Headings tightened, thin copy made substantial, internal links added between pages that belong next to each other. The page earns its ranking the legitimate way, by answering the question better than the pages above it.
Title tags, meta descriptions, schema markup, image alt text, sitemap, robots.txt, and Core Web Vitals. The plumbing search engines need in order to understand the site, set up once and set up correctly.
Search Console connected, a baseline taken, and a short written note each month for the first quarter on what is moving. Quiet check-ins, no dashboard theatre.
What changes locally
A Montréal SEO pass is structured French first, with keyword research done in French rather than translated from English findings. English becomes real parallel content with correct hreflang, not a widget. Each page in each language gets one honest target, thin pages get rewritten in the language they are meant to rank in, and the technical pass covers schema, internal links, and Core Web Vitals across both versions.
Note
Every engagement starts with a free written audit, including the Montréal ones. If we think the budget is better spent somewhere else, we will say so before you commit to anything. See everything we do in Montréal.
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Free written audit. No call required, no commitment, no upsell at the end.
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