Bilingual businesses in New Brunswick and how Google handles it

New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province in the country. Roughly a third of the population speaks French as a first language, concentrated in the north and east but present everywhere.

Which means a question comes up here that does not come up in most of Canada. Should your business be findable in both languages, and if so, what does that actually involve?

Most of the advice you will find online is written for national or American businesses and does not address it at all. Here is the practical version.

First, decide whether you need it

Be honest about this before spending anything.

You probably do need French if you are in or serve Moncton, Dieppe, Bathurst, Edmundston, Campbellton, Shediac, Caraquet or the north shore generally. In parts of that area, doing business in English only is a genuine limitation rather than a missed opportunity.

You might need it if you are in Fredericton or Saint John and serve customers travelling from elsewhere in the province, or you deal with provincial government, or you take work across the region.

You probably do not need it if you are a neighbourhood business in a predominantly English area serving people within a few kilometres. A barber in Fredericton's north side is not losing work to a language barrier.

The wrong reason to do it is because it seems like the correct thing to do. A half finished French section that nobody maintains is worse than none, because it looks like a business that started something and gave up.

How a Google profile handles two languages

The most common misunderstanding first.

You do not create two profiles. One business, one listing, always. Two listings for the same business is a duplicate, which splits your reviews and your ranking, and Google will eventually merge or remove one anyway.

What you can do on a single profile:

The business name stays as registered. Do not translate it and do not run two versions. Your legal name is your legal name.

The description can be written in both. You have 750 characters. A short version in each language fits comfortably. Lead with whichever language most of your customers use.

Services and their descriptions can include both, though this gets cluttered fast. Keep the service names in the primary language and put both in the descriptions if it matters.

Reviews arrive in whichever language the customer used, and this is where it counts most. If somebody leaves a review in French, reply in French. It is the clearest possible signal that you serve French speaking customers, and it is visible to everybody who reads your listing afterwards.

Posts can alternate, or include both languages in one post.

Google shows your listing to people searching in both languages regardless. The language of your content affects how relevant you look, not whether you appear at all.

Websites, and the part people overspend on

There are three honest options and most small businesses should take the first or second.

One page in French. A single page covering who you are, what you do, where you are, and how to reach you, written properly in French, linked clearly from your homepage. For most small local businesses this is genuinely enough. It signals you serve French speaking customers and gives them what they actually need.

A full parallel site. Every page in both languages, usually at yoursite.ca/fr. The right answer if a meaningful share of your customers are francophone. Costs roughly double to build and, more importantly, doubles the work of keeping it current forever.

Automatic translation widgets. Avoid these. They produce awkward French, they read as a business that could not be bothered, and Google does not treat machine translated pages the way it treats real ones. In a province where language is not a neutral subject, bad French is worse than no French.

If you go with a full parallel site, the technical piece that matters is telling search engines which page is which language and which alternates exist. Any competent builder handles this. If yours does not know what hreflang means, that is worth knowing.

Get it translated by a person

The most important practical point in this whole article.

Do not run your English copy through a translation tool and publish the result. Bilingual New Brunswickers can spot machine translated French in about a sentence, and the impression it creates is precisely the opposite of the one you were going for.

Proper translation of a small business website is not expensive. A five page site is a few hundred dollars with a local translator, and there are plenty in the province. It is a one time cost on content that will sit there for years.

The same applies to your Google description and your review replies. If you cannot write a reply in French yourself, have somebody who can draft a few templates you can adapt.

What this looks like in practice

For most of the businesses we work with, the useful version is fairly small.

A Google profile with a description in both languages. Review replies in whichever language the review came in. And either a French page or a full French version of the site depending on where the business sits and who it serves.

That is a modest amount of work and it covers the actual need. The businesses that overspend here are usually the ones who built a full parallel site they did not need and then let half of it go out of date.

If you are not sure which side of the line your business falls on, that is something our free review can give you a straight answer on. No pressure and no sales call.

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Call +1 506-801-9970 or email info@qhike.ca. We serve Fredericton, Moncton, Saint John and all of New Brunswick.