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BILINGUAL / HISPANIC / SPANISH SEO

The following is a compilation of the most recent metrics on the hispanic (USA) markets for those marketer targeting this audience. What inspired me to write this article, is the bast amount of marketers still using machine based translations to market their message, or in some cases, the most elaborate ones just care to pay “translations” for a few landing pages, then routing visitors to their English-only content.

We have found that the best results from our tests have proven than having language specific areas in the way to go. Preparing your website for a multilingual search engine submission campaign takes much more than just translating a page and its meta tags.

In fact, over 90% of all translated pages featured online do not respect the ongoing rules and regulations of foreign search engines! There is still a lot to be learned in this area, and we often find ourselves educating prospect/future clients on some of those facts, which I share in this post.

1 – Español:  Still the main search language

The first thing you should know is that being Bilingual doesn’t affect the language used, more than 99% of ALL Hispanics search the web in Spanish first… while more than 50% of US Hispanics prefer content in English, 15-20% prefer Spanish, and 35% prefer either “usually English” or “usually Spanish.”

2 – US: The world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking country

There are about50 million Hispanics in the US today, from which almost half (24+ million of them) use the internet. US is second only to Mexico, and has beat 20 other countries (including: Colombia, Argentina, Spain, and Peru). Out of the 50 million Hispanic steady-residents of the US, there are 60% of whom are Bilingual (“Spanglish”) to some degree and 40% of whom are dependent on either English or Spanish.

3 – Beyond US: 1.5+ billion Spanish-speaking population,  124+ million online

But wait. If that is not enough… Spanish has the highest language growth on the internet vs. all other languages!  Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world in terms of native speakers, after Mandarin Chinese.

4 – Google.com: Spanish search engine market leader

Google has 72% market share vs. Yahoo’s 17% and Bing’s 2%. 9% remains shared between local countries engines.

5 – The top 10 US states searching on Google.com

1. Florida 2. Texas 3. New Jersey 4. California 5. Arizona 6. Washington DC 7. New York 8. Nevada 9. Connecticut 10. Utah

Note: You may also want to evaluate if it makes sense for your business to target the areas of high Hispanic population density such as Florida, Texas, New Jersey, California and Arizona. In addition, you might want to pay particular attention to the regional differences of  Spanish.

For example, California is primarily Mexican, Florida is heavily Cuban and New York is mostly Puerto Rican. This means that in many instances, one phrase will not accurately reach all of these cultures effectively.

6 -Hispanics: The largest middle class in the US

Not only that… but today, the latest statistics show that over 88 percent have a household income of $50,000. On average Hispanics spend more than 14 hours online a week, which puts then among the highest online groups. In comparison, Hispanics spend 20% more time online and view 25% more web pages than the general US market.

7 – CPC: Huge cost savings vs. English counterpart

For instance, the average CPC for the term “credit cards” is $12.96, while the cost for the Spanish-language equivalent is just $1.96—almost 85 percent less!

Lastly, the Hispanic market is becoming more important than ever. Smart marketers will take the time to assess the opportunity today. But… while the Latin American and U.S. Hispanic markets have some overlap in terms of the type of demographics involved, they refer to two fairly distinct markets. It is important to keep in mind language specific metrics the foreign (outside USA) linguistic algorithms implement.

For these reasons, as part of our SEO services, we track international search engine optimization across 35 languages worldwide.

If you want to contact me about Bilingual / Hispanic SEO Services, or have any questions, call  1.510.473.6949 or email me at jose@greatseoconsultant.com and I will gladly reply asap.

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