Your website is ready to engage with your audience in France, Belgium, Quebec, or other francophone markets. But are they ready to engage with it?

SEO auditing is about making sure your website ticks the right content and technical boxes to rank and convert. Adding the francophone focus does not change its basic principles. However, there are additional aspects to consider. Find out everything you need to know about the specific checks required to conduct a francophone SEO audit.

Keyword research: for which French market?

The first thing that many clients tend to inquire about is which  SEO keywords they would need to focus on to engage the public in France, Switzerland, or Senegal. Fair enough, so let’s start there! When conducting keyword research, keep in mind that the search volumes should apply to the specific francophone market you aim to target. It’s also important to note that you won’t be able to access country-specific data from all platforms,  especially if you rely on free online tools.

The same applies to analyzing your organic traffic and ranking towards the keywords. It must be looked at one market at a time. The same web page in France will very rarely rank in the same position as it would in  Canada, Mali, or Luxembourg. Most professional SEO tools such as SEM Rush and Ahref deliver data per country. This way, you can conduct your keyword research and SERP ranking analysis at the right level, be it for a retailer in Ivory Coast, or a startup in Montreal.

On-page SEO audit for French audiences

On-page SEO is a major factor deciding your ranking in the SERPin France, and everywhere else. A large segment of the audit will touch on its different components. On-page SEO covers all the content delivered by your page. This includes what your visitors see:

• Texts
• images
• menus
• page URLs

In addition to these, on-page SEO will also cover everything that’s only read by search engines, such as metadata, heading structure, and images alternative descriptions. In nature, a francophone on-page SEO audit will thus be very large, covering all website content presented to your French-speaking audience. This includes, of course, the quality and relevance of the copy, making sure it is flawless and in the right tone of voice. But it goes beyond this – it also takes into consideration how the local audience will relate to your website design and structure:

• Usability: Are menus, navigation, page layout, and general functions delivered in a way that is common for users in the French-speaking market you’re targeting?
• Cultural dimensions: Will images, color themes, and the overall look and feel be positively perceived within the particular country culture of your francophone audience?
• Marketing: Are your positioning, UPS, communication, and corporate values well-matched with the general mindset of the French speakers you’re engaging with?

These aspects touch simple things with a direct impact, such as the popularity of available payment methods in any given French market. And deeper, more diffuse aspects, rooted in a nation’s cultural and aesthetic values.le things with a direct impact, such as the popularity of available payment methods on a given French market. And deeper, more diffuse aspects, rooted in a nation’s cultural and aesthetic values.

Case study: UK Currys vs French FNAC

To understand the depth of factors and elements to consider in a francophone SEO on-page audit, look at the major differences in design choices made by two leading electronics retailers; Currys in the UK, and  la FNAC in France:

Currys website (UK):

• The focus is on pricing (‘Epic deals‘), 
• Flat design 
• Hamburger menu on the top left

French FNAC: 

• The focus is on a feeling (‘summer fever‘)
• Warm colors 
• Traditional expanded  menu on the left

No doubt, each retailer’s homepage is best customized for their own domestic audience. Of course, not all design choices are down to this. FNAC’s historical roots in selling books can also explain its emotional and traditional layout compared to Currys’s site. Still, understanding how a website can be perceived differently across different cultures provides you with a strong edge against your competitor.

A correct francophone on-page SEO audit will thus help you spot any cultural faux pas in your website content. That includes understanding how French speakers evolve over time. Did you notice the French FNAC website tagline ‘summer fever’? It’s in English, but no mistake there; just up to date 2021 marketing!

If you’re interested in exploring these very interesting topics further, check out the differences between the Belgium and Russian city hall websites and this in-depth analysis of the link between the user interface and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions.

Francophone Technical SEO Audit

Country market specifics tend to have less of an impact within the technical SEO aspect of a Search Engine Optimization audit  ,compared to keyword research or usability. Here, the SEO auditor studies the general quality of your web platform and architecture to ensure that your site is fast, secure and easy to crawl and index by search engines.

It’s fair to say a website with great technical SEO metrics will perform well for most markets. Yet, there are several additional advantages to  focusing on francophone markets:

• If your website is served via a content delivery network, test the speed at which your pages are delivered for users geographically based in the French-speaking country you are engaging with.
• If your site is multilingual, do you deliver the French version based on the user IP, or browser language?
• Do you use structured data and schema markup to highlight relevant francophone countries, addresses and geographical information?
• Is the naming of your hubs and slugs (e.g., /about-us/history/) helping your francophone site indexation?

International SEO

International SEO is about optimizing your website so that the right language and regional version of your website are served to the right audience abroad. A francophone international SEO audit will thus look at how your website is served to audiences in French-speaking countries. That means, if your website has a French international version, Google should be able to index and serve this version to French speakers worldwide.

To sophisticate things a little, if you’d like to have a specific regional version of your website, targeting French Canadians for instance, a proper international SEO audit will help check that this version does not mix up incorrectly with your English Canadian viewers, nor visitors from other parts of the world who require the standard French version. To do this, you would need to look at the language tags we mentioned earlier, and further:

• URL structure: Is your French version delivered via a subdomain, such as fr.my-website.com, or a subdirectory, such as my-website.com/fr? Or something else, such as a cctLD (my-website.fr) or a parameter (my-website.com/?lang=fr)?
• Language attributes: These inform search engines  about the language and regions covered. Control the language attributes set in Html (lang or xml:lang tags) as well as in the HTTP headers to ensure that they are set to the right language “fr”, and to the right region. For instance “fr-CA”, for the French Canadian audience.
• Hreflang: For multilingual websites, this tag helps you group and specify the different language versions of the same page. This way, search engines know which page should be shown to each regional audience.
• Hosting: Is your site IP pointing to a server located in the francophone country that you target?

These researches enable us to understand why the French version of your website might not be indexed and served properly to francophone audiences. They will also help to reduce risks related to duplicated content, in case the same page available in several languages would be mistakenly considered as copycats by a search engine.

Off-page SEO

Last but not least, your off-page SEO tactic should be audited with your francophone market in mind. Off-page SEO is the analysis and work regarding the improvement of the number and quality of links directing to your website, placed on  sites other than yours, by editors, webmasters, and social media users. These backlinks, and the outreach and link-building strategies to improve them, have a strong influence on search engines. The more websites you have linking to your website, the greater the chances of its reputation and ranking improving.

Understandably, the language and regional aspects have a great impact on this. If some of the incoming links are placed from French websites and web pages in French, this will carry more weight for your organic results and rankings on these markets. Especially if these linking pages are relevant to your business. A French off-page SEO audit will thus look at external links in general, but more specifically, at how your website links to the French speaking web.

As kindly highlighted by our pals at Design Rush in their ranking of French SEO agencies, Uncliched is a right option to improve your SEO performances in the French-speaking web. Come discuss your goals with us!

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Author : Nicolas Morel.