Technical SEO Consultant in Montreal

Splash pages, automatic redirects and the language cookie

A familiar pattern on Montreal websites is the language gate: the home page asks visitors to choose Français or English before showing anything, or the server silently redirects each visitor based on browser settings or location, then remembers the choice in a cookie. For people this feels helpful. For search engines it can be a problem.

Crawlers generally do not carry a browser language preference or a stored cookie, and they may crawl from outside Quebec. A site that decides the language from those signals can end up showing crawlers only one version, or sending them in a loop between versions. A splash page with no real content at the root URL can also waste the strongest page on the site. Some sites go further and serve both languages from the same address, switching only by cookie, which leaves search engines unable to index one of them reliably.

I test these behaviors directly, with and without cookies and with different language headers, and compare what a crawler receives with what a person sees. The usual fix is simple to describe: each language at its own stable address, a visible switcher that links to the equivalent page, and suggestions rather than forced redirects. How the French text itself is produced is a separate question covered on the Canadian technical SEO page.

Festival and event sites that start over every year

Montreal's calendar of music, comedy, film, food and sporting events produces a particular kind of website. Each year the program is announced, artist and venue pages appear, tickets go on sale, traffic surges, and after the event the site goes quiet until the next edition. Too often the next edition is built by overwriting the previous one, or on a new subdomain, and the site loses much of what it had earned.

I design a structure that keeps one lasting address for the event and its main sections, with past editions archived under clear paths so they stay useful for people looking back at previous programs. Artist and show pages need a policy: keep them if the artist returns, redirect them to the edition archive if not. Event structured data needs dates, venues and offers updated for each edition, and stale event markup removed.

Ticketing is usually handled by a third-party platform on another domain, which affects tracking and sometimes the user journey. I check how links to ticketing are built, whether analytics follow the visitor through, and whether any ticketing pages are being indexed in place of your own. Because the traffic arrives in a short window, I also review page speed and server capacity before announcements, not after. The schema markup consulting page covers structured data in more depth.

Restaurants, cafes and the PDF menu

Montreal's restaurant scene is one of the city's best-known features, and many restaurant websites are designed to look good rather than to be read by machines. Menus are often uploaded as PDFs or images, sometimes only in one language. Reservations run through an embedded widget, online ordering sits on a delivery platform's domain, and opening hours appear in a graphic that nobody updates when terrace season starts.

Some PDF text can be indexed, but a menu published as an image is largely invisible, and a PDF that changes name every season breaks every link to it. I recommend menus as normal web pages in French and English, with dishes and sections in text, and a downloadable PDF as an extra if the restaurant wants it. Opening hours, address and contact details should be in text and in structured data, kept consistent with the Business Profile, especially when hours change for the seasons or holidays.

I also check that reservation and ordering widgets do not slow the page badly or block the main content from loading, and that the site makes clear which ordering links are official. For groups with several locations, each restaurant needs its own page with its own details. See multi-location local SEO for that wider setup.

Fashion brands, seasonal collections and wholesale portals

Montreal has a lively fashion and design community, from established apparel companies to independent labels selling online. Their sites share a pattern: collections launch by season, products sell out, styles are discontinued, and last year's collection pages either vanish or linger as empty shells. Each of these leaves behind dead URLs, soft errors or thin pages that waste crawling and frustrate shoppers who arrive from old links.

I set clear rules for each case. A temporarily sold-out product usually stays live with a clear status and alternatives. A permanently discontinued style is redirected to its closest successor or its category. Past collections either become curated archive pages with real content or are consolidated. Lookbook and campaign pages, often heavy with photography, are checked for image size, lazy loading and whether their text is visible to crawlers.

Many of these brands also sell wholesale. Line sheets, trade price lists and retailer portals sometimes end up crawlable, creating duplicate product pages with wholesale pricing in search results. I check that trade areas sit behind a login or are excluded from indexing, and that public product pages are the ones that rank. My general audit process is set out under technical SEO audit.

Working alongside your web agency, remotely

Many Montreal sites are built and maintained by local web agencies or freelance developers, and I work alongside them rather than replacing them. The engagement is remote and runs in English. I deliver findings as tickets with the problem, the evidence, the proposed fix and how to test it, so your developer can schedule the work without needing a long meeting.

Where fixes touch French content, such as page titles, menu text or structured data descriptions, the French wording is supplied or approved by your own French-speaking staff or the agency's writers. I specify where the text goes and what it must achieve; they make sure it reads naturally.

After each release I recrawl, check indexing reports and confirm the fix is live. For seasonal sites, I schedule extra checks before announcements, launches and terrace or festival season. Measurement focuses on indexed pages by language, crawl errors, page experience on mobile, and organic visits and conversions to key pages. Related pages: the Montreal SEO consultant page for keyword and content strategy, and the technical SEO service for the general approach.