Overview
Etic France manufactures secure documents: holograms, secure papers, thermochromic inks, guilloche, microtext, watermarks, VOID labels. The kind of production nobody notices when it is done well, and that becomes a state-level problem when it is not. Its customers: large accounts, public administrations, public tenders, and a French-speaking market in West Africa.
The starting point
The site had just been rebuilt, but with no SEO component: when I arrived, it was not yet generating inbound requests. The potential, though, was clearly there (genuine industrial expertise and an online ordering platform). It simply lacked the visibility foundations.
The diagnosis pointed to the classic workstreams of a site never optimised for search: mobile performance to improve, conversions not yet tracked, click-through rate to lift in Google results through proper title tags and structured data, and an ageing multilingual setup to modernise.
On that last point, the company wanted a real English version, not on-the-fly machine translation: genuine, indexable pages with their own URLs and their own metadata. That is what opens international markets to a manufacturer whose prospects don't all speak French.
Objectives
- Lift rankings and click-through rate, to turn impressions into visits
- Deliver a genuinely indexable English version, not a machine-translation overlay
- Clean up the technical stack and make inbound requests measurable
- Make form leads actually reach their destination
What I did
- Ongoing SEO with monthly reporting: rework of title tags, metadata and structured data, where click-through rate is won.
- A complete English version: around 29 contents translated and published (service pages, technical sub-pages, articles, legal pages) with anglicised addresses, internal links repointed, menus rebuilt and dedicated metadata across 16 pages.
- Structured data and hreflang: French ↔ English pairings verified page by page, and JSON-LD blocks switched to English on the EN side.
- Migration from machine translation to proper multilingual management, removing the automatic overlay once the replacement was working.
- Made the site's emails reliable: messages, including form leads, were being sent without authentication. Authenticated sending put in place, and the site's admin address corrected: it was still pointing at a previous provider.
- Operational fixes: a mobile menu whose sub-items could not be reached by finger, broken images, form labels and confirmation messages still in French on the English version.
Modernising an ageing multilingual setup
The site was running a multilingual plugin dating from 2015, on a server running modern PHP. A decade apart. It threw errors continuously, and its own installer was broken, so updating it through the normal route was impossible. A perfect vicious circle: the plugin was broken because it was obsolete, and impossible to update because it was broken.
The first update attempt took down the site and its admin. Restored the same day by the host, then redone properly: full backup, server upload limits raised, then installation by the reliable route. Version up to date, English pages back, no content lost.
The lesson goes beyond this project: never attempt a major version jump without a backup and without an atomic installation method. What costs money is not the update: it is the failed update on a live site.
The blocker no tutorial mentions: the site's theme simply ignored the multilingual plugin's language switcher. It never rendered in the header. With no switcher, removing the machine translation would have left visitors unable to change language. Rather than give up, I wrote a custom switcher that queries the plugin's own programming interface directly and points to the real translation of the current page. That is what unlocked the whole migration.
Results
The average position moved from 36 to 12 over the tracked period: the site climbed out of the depths to reach the bottom of page one, where clicks finally exist. The English version is live and genuinely indexable: clean addresses, English metadata, paired hreflang, translated menus and footer, and a contact form in English right down to its confirmation messages.
What is still open
Three French pages await a content decision before translation, which will complete the English menu. Mobile performance remains the heaviest and most profitable project ahead. And the email deliverability gain still depends on technical records to be added by the domain provider.
Business impact: a company that received no requests through its website now has a foundation that is climbing the results, an English-speaking channel open to international markets, and a lead chain that sends and arrives. The next step up will not be won on keywords: it will be won on speed.