Do different language versions of websites rank as good as the main

Question

I'm currently building a website complete with its seo for a dental clinic in Turkey. I am trying to aim for different languages to get traffic from there too, but have some questions. Will the french sites ranking, for example, be affected a lot by the english one? I'm asking whether or not there would be a radical difference between them, as in even if they were reasonably close in their SEO quality, would the english version which received lots of backlinks make the french one rank a lot higher. Do french pages rank completely irrelevant with the english one or would one which got extreme attention in one country affect the other countries a lot too?

I understand that being completely irrelevant would make sense, as in the company may have f'ed up a foreign version or just not very popular in areas that speak french, but the company as a whole, getting backlinks from extremely high ranking websites for its english version would sure make google reconsider the website and rank it higher, as it is a trusted company in general.

The reason I'm asking this is due to marketing strategy. I don't want to be building links for both english and french pages of the website and would be very happy if just getting backlinks for the english one would get the french one to rank it higher.

Answer 1

Having the site rank high in one language does not mean it will be high in other languages.

However, if you link your English instance (with high reputation) with the instance in other languages, it will help that new instance in terms of SEO, but it will still not guaranty a high rank.

So, it is highly recommended to link instances with hreflang tags, but you should work on SEO content for each language since just translating the site will not guaranty high rank.

You can check this official video from Google for more information. It is one of the best resources that will explain exactly what you need.