Spanish SEO for the Latino Market. Is it really necessary?

Spanish SEO or SEO en Español continues to be a cost-effective strategy to reach the Hispanic market in Google Search

Marketing in Spanish in the U.S. may not seem like an innovation nowadays; however, a small number of brands and companies seem to be doing it right, or sustaining the growth once they have reached some level of verifiable success.

There Was a Time

Yeah, there was a time,
Didn’t wanna know it all,
Didn’t wanna know it all and
I don’t wanna know it now…

…when bidding on Spanish-language keywords in AdWords campaigns would cost 3 or 4 times less than bidding on English-language terms. It was a panacea for a while for those brands and agencies that took advantage during this great low competitive time. However, and speaking only from our experience, in the last year or so, the cost-per-click for Spanish-language terms have been gradually catching up to their equivalent counterparts in English, as more agencies started to bid – knowingly or not – on Spanish-language terms, after all Google is making it considerably easier for “everyone” to apply a $100 coupon and give it a try. Result: Not so much striking lower CPCs using Spanish terms these days…

Where does that lead us?

This makes your efforts in generating organic traffic to your Spanish-language pages even more important, and likely to have a profound effect on success, if you want to stay within your budget without seeing your marketing dollars evaporate in your PPC campaigns. Having said that, let’s discuss culture and language first, for they influence very much indeed the effectiveness of your Latino SEO campaigns.

Culture is not where language becomes obsolete but where English and Spanish meet

Many “multicultural” agencies may want to tell you that marketing in a specific language is obsolete. In our experience, this is a simplistic generalized notion far from the truth.

First of all, not all industries and geo-locations are created equal. To illustrate this, an immigration lawyer in Miami or Houston or Los Angeles may experience more than 50% of their traffic coming from Spanish-language pages, considering they have “English / Spanish” web pages. A client of ours, in particular, is getting 75% of their organic traffic from Spanish-language terms. This allows them to concentrate their AdWords budget bidding on more competitive English-language terms only for Spanish-language market is covered thanks to organic search. Try to tell this attorney that marketing in Spanish doesn’t work ;).

Second of all, a good marketer meets the audience where they are, and don’t push a certain channel or strategy because it’s assumed to be what it would work best in theory. However, doing it this way requires a lot of trial and error, measuring what works and what doesn’t, and follow where the metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) lead you.

Following metrics and KPIs is vital to stay relevant to your audience, smart and lean in terms of your efforts and resources, and result-oriented in terms of meeting your objectives set for the digital marketing campaign, said Sebastian Aroca, President of Hispanic Market Advisors®

Marketing to Hispanics: Where Culture and Language Meet

We should start with the recognition that cultural identity is vital for Latinos, regardless of their language of preference. It’s also significant to understand and value the role of the Spanish-language among the Hispanic community. We cannot separate culture and language for simplicity sake. Thus, if you are in conversation with a Hispanic marketing agency, try not to fall in the trap of generalizations such as “mobile is important for reaching Latinos” or “Latinos over index in social media use.”

Designing an Action Plan that is Specific to Your Business and Industry

Everyone can grab a few stats from Pew Hispanic Research and run a keyword research using a free keyword tool and automatically feel a marketing guru. In reality, if a marketing professional cannot speak within the context of your business and industry, it may be better to switch gear in search for an agency partner that can analyze your business from various levels and give you a deeper more thorough proposal for your consideration. Remember that it takes two to tango!

We couldn’t finish this blog post without a call-to-action… Request Call for 20-Min Complimentary Initial Consultation to discuss your opportunities and refer to this page when you talk to us.