More than 41 million Americans ages 5 and over speak Spanish1. Among U.S. Hispanics, the Pew Research Center estimated that more than 60% are bilingual2. Meanwhile, research has shown that two-thirds of Hispanics pay attention to online ads—a rate more than 20 percentage points higher than the general U.S. population3.
From a marketing standpoint, the implications are clear: An inclusive approach to Spanish-speaking Americans is a must. One way to accomplish this is through search-engine optimized (SEO) content that takes language into account.
As with English SEO, Spanish SEO can bring traffic to web pages through search engines, or it can bring potential consumers to product pages on eCommerce platforms like Amazon. Keyword research performed in English on an Amazon-oriented tool like Jungle Scout, for example, will often reveal some Spanish phrases sharing space with the English ones, suggesting an increasing lack of boundaries between the languages.
Although shoppers who visit Amazon and other sites have the option of translating contents to Spanish,it is reasonable to infer that many online shoppers speak some combination of English and Spanish and that both languages figure in their search habits. In the right context, the appearance of a few well-selected Spanish words alongside English copy might serve as a way of letting these shoppers know they are seen and appreciated.
However, because real estate for the written word is limited, it will usually be more practical to include the most relevant Spanish keywords in your SEO bidding strategy or incorporate them into your back-end SEO to ensure that people who search them are finding their way to your page, whether the keywords are visible to them or not.
Spanish keywords thus carry the potential to achieve a few things simultaneously:
- evoke positive feelings among shoppers of Hispanic backgrounds
- make a brand’s eCommerce content feel less rote or mechanistic
- bring more eyes to the brand and its product offerings
With a sufficiently sensitive strategy, these goals can be accomplished without negatively impacting traffic from customers who do not speak Spanish. But “sensitive” is a key word (no pun intended) as there are also a few things that could go wrong.
