Canada is a big market. It is the largest trading partner of the USA and has population of over 30 million. Canada’s per capita income is one of the highest in the world. So building up a strong online presence in Canada makes good business sense.
Canada poses another challenge to website owners. The country has two official languages which have been constituted in a National Languages act: English and French (Canadian French, also referred to as French Canadian). Since about 7 million people in Canada speak French as their native language, this is a population that can not be overlooked.
A website owner needs to consider two factors when promoting a website for use in Canada: geotargeting (obtaining high rankings in Canadian search engines) and language targeting (translating and optimizing the website for native French speakers).
The safest way to approach geotargeting for Canada is to purchase a .ca top-level-domain (TLD). All major search engines have a Canadian version of their search engine (e.g., www.bing.ca) and they rank .ca domains at the top of search engine queries made in the Canadian search engine.
Another issue to consider is, although a very minor one, is the use of English for Canadian audiences. Canadian English is a mixture of UK English and US English with some very few Canadian distinctions. Please see this for some information on Canadian English. So you probably do not need to maintain a separate language version for Canadian English and you can use your UK or US English website content in your .ca domain. You may want to use some basic redirects for some of the pages in your Canadian site to avoid duplicate content on your websites.
The issue of French Canadian is more complex. The differences between European French and Canadian French are major, and here you will need to maintain separate European French and Canadian French language versions (if you need to have both). Both Google and Bing have Canadian French language versions of their search engines which favor websites that are written in French Canadian. Make sure to maintain the correct meta tag in your Canadian French website pages (<meta http-equiv=”Content-language“ content=“fr-ca“>).
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