Why your YouTube videos aren’t reaching Quebec
It isn’t your content. It’s the language your content is wrapped in.
Open your YouTube analytics and find Canada. Now look for Quebec. If you make videos in English, there’s a good chance the province barely registers, even if your topic (cooking, renovation, personal finance, cars) is something Quebecers care about as much as anyone.
That gap isn’t a verdict on your videos. It’s mostly a language problem, and it’s more fixable than it looks.
Quebec searches in French
About nine million people live in Quebec, and most of them live their online lives in French. When someone in Sherbrooke wants to fix a dripping tap, they don’t type “how to fix a leaky faucet”. They type « comment réparer un robinet qui coule ».
YouTube matches searches against your title and description first. An English title can’t match a French query, no matter how good the video is. So your video doesn’t lose the competition for that viewer. It never enters it.
“But lots of Quebecers speak English”
Some do. In the 2021 census, 46% of Quebecers said they could hold a conversation in both English and French. That still leaves more than half who can’t, and it says nothing about preference. Plenty of bilingual viewers will happily watch you in English once they’ve found you. Very few will go looking for you in English when a French video answers the same question.
Montreal is also not Quebec. Off the island, French is overwhelmingly the language of daily life, and that’s where most of the province’s viewers live.
Subtitles help the people who already found you
French subtitles are a nice courtesy, and they do help some viewers. But they come with two problems.
The first is discovery. A viewer has to land on your video before your subtitles can do anything for them, and someone searching in French mostly won’t.
The second is attention. Subtitles turn a video into reading homework. That’s fine for a documentary. It’s a lot to ask of someone watching a 14-minute tutorial with their hands covered in grout, or a Short scrolling past on the bus. Viewers tend to drop off sooner when they have to read along, and YouTube pays attention to how long people stay.
What actually works
A French title and description. YouTube Studio lets you add a translated title and description to any video, and the video can then be found by people searching in French. It’s the cheapest change on this list. Do it even before anything else.
A French audio track. If your channel has access to multi-language audio, you can add a French track to the same video. Viewers whose YouTube is set to French hear it by default, and every view, like and comment still counts toward the one video. If you don’t have access yet, a separate French channel is the other route. We compare the two in a separate article.
A voice that’s still yours. Your audience follows you, not just the topic. A French version read by a stranger keeps the information and loses the person. When the French track is in your own voice, with your lips moving in time, French-speaking viewers get what your English viewers get: you.
Where to start
You don’t need to dub your whole channel at once. Start with what already works.
- Open your analytics and sort your videos by watch time over the last year.
- Set aside anything tied to a moment: news, trends, “best gear of 2024”. Keep the evergreen ones.
- Pick five. Those are your first French videos.
- Write French titles a Quebecer would actually type. Not a translation of your English title: a search. « Comment » is your friend.
- Watch what Quebec does in your analytics over the next few weeks.
If those five videos find a French audience, you’ll know the next twenty will too. If they don’t, you’ve learned something for the price of five videos instead of a whole channel.
One more thing: the comments
When French-speaking viewers show up, some of them will comment in French. Answer in French, even briefly. Two lines in their language do more for loyalty than any thumbnail.