The brief
KidsUp Kanata is an early-childhood development center in west Ottawa, serving families with children aged 18 months to six years. The catchment is unusually trilingual — Kanata has substantial English, French, and Ukrainian-Canadian populations, and the center wanted a site that worked in all three from day one without one language being a second-class citizen.
The launch had to coincide with the facility opening and had to fill the program to capacity quickly enough to justify the lease.
What we did
Trilingual site, single codebase
EN, FR, UK localizations on next-intl with proper hreflang. Each locale has its own metadata, program descriptions, and enrollment forms — not auto-translated. We worked with parent-volunteers in the community for the Ukrainian copy review.
Program catalogue with Course schema
Eight programs by age band, each with schedule, price, philosophy, instructor info, and a per-program FAQ. Course schema and CourseInstance markup so the programs surface in rich results.
Google Business Profile setup and local SEO
GBP optimized with full service catalog, category alignment (Early Childhood Development → Day Care Service → Educational Institution), weekly posts, photo cadence. Citation submissions to all relevant Canadian directories.
Enrollment flow tied to schedule availability
Multi-step enrollment with document upload (vaccination records, parental ID, emergency contacts), age-appropriate consent flows, payment integration for the registration deposit. Calendar showing real availability per program, updated nightly from the center's internal system.
Reviews and word-of-mouth amplification
Post-trial-class email and SMS sequence asking for Google review. Display of reviews on relevant pages with AggregateRating schema. Community-event sponsorships tied to UTM-tracked landing pages.
What we learned
The Ukrainian-language pages punched far above their weight. Kanata's Ukrainian-Canadian community is well-networked, and once two or three families had enrolled they drove most of the subsequent referrals organically. The trilingual investment we initially treated as a "nice to have" turned out to be the channel that filled the program.
The other surprise: AI-search visibility started driving real bookings by month nine. Parents searching "best preschool in Kanata" on ChatGPT and Perplexity began arriving at the site with high intent. We didn't optimize for this explicitly at launch, but the schema and content structure we built for classic SEO carried over.
Related
For similar educational sites: /creation-of-an-educational-website. For multilingual local SEO: /seo-promotion. For the AI-visibility work that started paying off post-launch: /promotion-in-ai-search-and-llm-systems.
Project lead: Marketing MIX. Client: KidsUp Kanata. Year: 2024–2026.