A Third Of The City Grew Up In French
13,225 people here have French as a mother tongue and about half the city can hold a conversation in it. Almost no local website reflects that.
One second language, at scale
The difference matters in Timmins, because it changes the answer. A city with forty languages cannot build for all of them. A city with one can.
Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population
Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population
Statistics Canada, Key facts on the French language in Ontario, 2021
In a Timmins where fifteen languages each account for a few per cent, translation is a losing proposition: you cannot build fifteen sites and choosing three is a decision about who matters. That is the usual argument against translating, and it is correct in most markets.
Timmins is the exception, and it is the exception by a wide margin for anyone building here. There is one second language, it belongs to roughly a third of residents as a first language, and about half the city can use it. A French side to a website here is not a gesture towards inclusion; it is reaching a market the size of the English one.
Almost nobody does it. Timmins website design projects are quoted, built and launched in English, with a translate button in the corner if anything at all, which is how a market this size stays this uncontested.
How to do it
In Timmins there is a cheap way and a real way, and the cheap way delivers none of the benefit at about a tenth of the cost, which is why it keeps getting chosen.
The Timmins mechanics are not complicated. French pages get their own addresses, the two versions declare that they are alternates of each other, and the language is set in the markup so a browser and a screen reader both know what they are looking at. Any competent build handles this; it is a decision rather than a technical obstacle.
What it genuinely costs is the writing. A French page written by a person who speaks the French spoken in Timmins is worth having. A machine translation of your English page, published as a real page, is worse than not bothering, because now the error is permanent and indexed.
What to build
An English site with a translate widget, or nothing at all, in a city where roughly half the population can read French and about a third grew up in it. It is not a decision anybody made; it is the default a quote arrives with, and nobody in the meeting raises it. A timmins web design project that never asks the question has answered it by accident.
Ask first whether your customers are the francophone half, which for some businesses they emphatically are and for others they are not. Where they are, build four real French pages with their own addresses, written by somebody who speaks the French spoken here. Where they are not, say so and spend the money elsewhere.
The honest caveat
The argument above is strong and it is not universal across Timmins. Three things decide whether it applies to you.
A Timmins French page that leads to an English-only phone call is a worse experience than an English page honestly presented. The website cannot be ahead of the business, and in this market it very often is.
For a Timmins site: services, price, contact and proof. Two versions of a forty-page site drift apart within a year and the French one quietly becomes the out-of-date one, which is a louder signal than never having built it.
A Timmins difficulty of 1 on the main search term is a fair measure of how contested this market is. The French half is less contested still, and being the only business in a category that answers in French is a durable position.
How it goes
Four stages for a Timmins build, and the French decision is made in the first one rather than bolted on at the end.
Week one
Can you serve Timmins in French, are your customers consumers or contracts, and will somebody maintain a second set of pages. Three honest answers decide the shape of the whole project, and they take twenty minutes rather than a discovery phase.
Weeks one to three
Even if French comes later, the Timmins addresses, navigation and markup should assume it. Retrofitting a second language into a site that was built as though it would never need one is most of the cost, and it is avoidable for nothing at the start.
Week four
Services, price, contact and proof, by somebody who speaks the French spoken in Timmins, each with its own address and declared as the alternate of its English page. Four is enough to be real and few enough to stay current.
Ongoing
On a Timmins site, a change to the English price page that does not reach the French one creates a contradiction a customer will eventually find. Keeping four pages in step is a habit; keeping forty in step is a job nobody was hired for, which is why the number matters.
Questions
In Timmins, more than almost anywhere else in the province. 13,225 residents have French as a mother tongue, roughly a third of the city, and about half the population can hold a conversation in it. That is not a diverse mix of many languages where choosing would be arbitrary; it is one second language at a scale that makes a French side worth real money. Whether it is right for your business depends on whether you can actually serve those customers when they call.
It delivers none of the benefit to a Timmins site. A widget translates in the browser after the page has loaded, so no second address exists for a search engine to find, the result cannot be shared or bookmarked, and names and prices come out mangled. Somebody searching in French will never reach you through it. The real version is four written pages with their own addresses, which is more work and is the only version that reaches anybody new.
Four. Services, price, contact and proof, which for most Timmins businesses is the whole offer. The temptation is to mirror the whole site, and the result is two versions that drift apart within a year until the French one is visibly out of date, which is a worse signal than never having built it. Four pages can be kept level by a person with a habit. Forty need a process nobody has agreed to run.
Then fix that first or do not build the Timmins page. A French landing page that leads to an English-only phone call is a worse experience than an honest English site, because it raises an expectation and then breaks it at the moment of contact. The website cannot run ahead of the business. In a city where about half the population can work in French, the staffing question is worth asking on its own merits anyway.
The main Timmins search term carries a keyword difficulty of 1, which is the lowest in our grid by a distance, and the French half is less contested still. That is not an argument that ranking solves everything, because 110 searches a month is a small number however easy it is. It is an argument that being the only business in your category that answers properly in French is cheap to achieve and hard for anyone to take back.
Next step
Send us the address and tell us who your customers are. We will tell you whether a French side is worth building for you, honestly, including when it is not.
NewLife Marketing · 70 Bearberry Rd, Minesing, ON L9X 2E1 · 705-302-1097 · Serving Timmins and the surrounding area.
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