A premium dealer, a demanding bilingual market
SwissMcars operates in the Swiss premium automotive market: high-end used vehicles, European imports, demanding clientele looking for vehicle quality and purchase experience equally. The client base is also international: foreign buyers visiting Switzerland to purchase premium vehicles. Serving both French AND English speakers seamlessly is non-negotiable.
The previous site was a basic, monolingual, static showcase. To manage the catalog, the team had to go through an external freelance developer, a dependency that slowed every vehicle addition and blocked publication of SEO-driven blog articles.
3 friction points capping digital growth
A monolingual site in an international market
Impossible to seriously capture international English-speaking clientele with a French-only site. Google Translate doesn't cut it: a premium buyer paying 80,000 CHF wants a site that speaks their language.
Permanent technical dependency
Every vehicle addition, every price change, every blog article went through a freelance. Days-to-weeks delays, accumulating invoices, team frustration.
No SEO content strategy
Without internal CMS, no active blog. Without active blog, no visibility on long-tail queries like "premium used car Switzerland". The competitor publishing 2 articles per month took all the spotlight.
A bilingual Next.js site + complete back-office
We delivered a modern Next.js site, bilingual FR/EN from go-live, with a custom back-office that covers 100% of business needs: vehicle catalog management with high-resolution photos, detailed technical sheets, editorial blog management, and import/export system for the European market.
The SwissMcars team now publishes their vehicles and articles directly, in both languages, without any dev intervention from us. That's the essence of Pilotage: a site you no longer have to endure.
4 weeks, 4 phases, no scope creep
Scoping & i18n architecture
Audit of existing site, identification of content to migrate, modeling of vehicle data (FR/EN specs adjusted by target market).
Mockups & design system
Desktop + mobile mockups in both languages simultaneously. Validation of typographic grid to handle length variations between FR and EN.
Frontend + back-office dev
Next.js frontend with native i18n routing, back-office with auth, vehicle CRUD, FR/EN WYSIWYG blog editor, media management.
Content migration & go-live
Migration of existing catalog, translation of missing content, 2h training of the team on back-office, onboarding videos, production deploy.
Stock managed autonomously, active blog, zero support
Management autonomy
The SwissMcars team publishes vehicles and articles directly, in 2 languages. Zero external dev intervention on routine operations.
Active multilingual SEO
Google.ch and international Google indexing with correct hreflang. English-speaking clientele is now seriously targeted, no longer best-effort.
Support tickets since go-live
Stable architecture, solid training, video documentation. The team is autonomous from day 1: that's the goal of a successful delivery.
Mobile perf score 95+
Site served in Next.js SSG/ISR, WebP optimised images, lazy loading, critical fonts inlined. LCP < 2s on Swiss 4G connection.
[Quote from the SwissMcars team being validated, will be added here when available. The site has been in production for several months and runs without intervention.]
Video testimonial currently being recorded with the SwissMcars team.
Do you have a multilingual or international auto project?
Swiss dealer, European importer, premium international broker: 15 minutes to scope your need and identify the right i18n architecture. No commitment.