Your French and English versions are competing for the same page
Two versions of the same page without a complete language declaration leave Google to decide alone. It picks the one it considers most established and often serves the wrong one. A Quebec business then loses the market it thought it had opened by translating.
The case here is more complex than the textbook one. A Quebec B2B business serves French in Quebec, English in the rest of Canada, and sometimes English aimed at the United States, where the vocabulary, the units and the standards cited are not the same. Three versions, two languages, and a declaration that has to be accurate for each.
The declaration rests on three rules that integrations regularly miss. Each version has to declare itself. Each version has to declare all the others. And each declaration has to be reciprocal, failing which Google ignores the whole set rather than keeping half of it.
A translation plugin does not settle the question on its own. It produces the tags, it does not decide which versions exist or for which market, and it falls out of sync as soon as a page is created outside its flow, which happens with every page added by another team.
Since Google removed its international targeting report in 2022, no official tool flags these errors site-wide. They install themselves without warning, often during a rebuild or when a translation plugin is added.
The symptom to recognize
A business has just translated its site, English traffic does not move, and the explanation adopted in the meeting is that the English market is harder. That is not wrong, but it is almost never the cause.
The real clue is in the data: English impressions exist, but they point to your French pages. The need is there, the wrong page is served, and the visitor leaves before looking for the language switcher.
The two-minute check
- In Search Console, filter pages containing your English prefix and compare their impressions to the equivalent French pages.
- View the source of a translated page and check that it declares itself in addition to declaring its sibling versions.
English impressions on French pages mean the demand exists and the translation is not receiving it. That is a technical fix, not a market problem.
Checking that mechanism page by page before investing in an English-speaking market is part of what we cover in a paid audit.
The language declaration is a hint, not an instruction. Google may serve another version if it judges it a better fit for the person searching. Genuinely distinct English content weighs more than a perfect tag on a word-for-word translation.
This work sits inside the wider picture described in a complete guide for SMBs and large companies.
The obligations framing an English version in Quebec are detailed in your website's language obligations, and the wider framework in B2B websites in Quebec.
- Google Search Central, Tell Google about localized versions of your page, official documentation, accessed December 2026.
- Google, The International Targeting report is deprecated, Search Console Help, accessed December 2026.
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