Technical SEO for Canadian websites

What a technical audit covers

We start from your Search Console and a full crawl of the site, then compare what you intend to be indexed with what Google actually indexes. The gap is where most quick wins hide: duplicate URLs, pages blocked by mistake, thin pages that should be merged, and important pages that are buried five clicks deep.

The technical SEO checklist shows the full list we work from.

Priorities are ranked by effort and likely impact, so a small business can start with the three fixes that matter most instead of a 200-line spreadsheet.

Bilingual sites and hreflang

Canada is where hreflang mistakes are easiest to make. A site may serve en-CA, fr-CA, and also en-US visitors. Each version needs its own URL, a self-referencing tag and a return tag from every alternate. Language and region codes must be valid, so use en-CA and fr-CA, never en-ca-fr.

Quebec searchers use French terms that differ from French in France, so fr-CA content is not simply a copy of fr-FR. Machine translation without a native review often misses these. We flag which terms to check and who should review. The hreflang generator can build the tags once your URLs are fixed.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

Google measures Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift from real visits. In Canada, a good share of visits come from phones on cellular networks, including outside large cities, so we test with throttled profiles. The usual fixes are image compression and sizing, loading scripts later, removing unused plugins and serving files from a close CDN node.

We report field data from the Chrome User Experience Report where it exists, and lab data where it does not, so you can see which numbers come from real users. Our Core Web Vitals checklist lists the order we work in.

Migrations, redesigns and domain changes

Technical SEO matters most when something is about to change. A redesign, a platform move from WordPress to Shopify or the other way, or a switch from .com to .ca can lose years of ranking if redirects and canonicals are not handled. We build a redirect map before launch, test it on staging, and watch Search Console and server logs for the first weeks.

If you are moving to a .ca domain, remember CIRA's Canadian presence requirements for registrants, and keep the old domain redirecting for at least a year. Our website migration checklist covers the steps.

Privacy tags and tracking

Consent tools can break measurement and speed at the same time. Under Quebec Law 25 and general PIPEDA expectations, non-essential tracking should wait for the visitor's choice. We set up tags so essential functions load fast and analytics or advertising pixels load after consent, then check that Search Console data, which does not depend on your cookies, remains your primary source of truth.

How we work

1. AuditSearch Console review, crawl and a prioritized list with effort and impact marked.
2. FixWe change the site if we have access, or write developer-ready tickets with examples.
3. VerifyRe-crawl, validate in Search Console and confirm that changes stuck.
4. MonitorMonthly checks for new errors, speed drops and indexing changes.

Calls are in Canadian mornings. 9:00 in Montreal is 19:30 in India in winter, and 18:30 in summer. We send written findings after each call.

Each month you receive a plain summary: what we found, what we fixed, what is waiting on your developer and what to expect next. Anything urgent, such as a page that suddenly drops out of the index, gets flagged the same day.

Pricing

Projects start at $1,500 and our rate is $30 an hour, in US dollars. Audit depth, site size and who makes the fixes decide the cost. See the technical SEO service page for scope, and the Canada SEO overview for how this fits the wider plan.