SearchInsider's "Gaining Web Site Traction With a Spanish Flare"

[Nacho]

Richard Hagerty from MediaPost's Search Insider did a great piece today (Thursday January 27, 2005) titled "Gaining Web Site Traction With a Spanish Flare" which talks about how important and big the opportunity is to reaching the U.S. Hispanic market. A topic which I'm very passionate about.

In the article, Richard mentions the following:

In addition, higher organic results can often be driven by content written in Spanish, as indexed Spanish page volume is currently quantitatively smaller (and therefore less competitive) when compared to the quantity of indexed English content.

This I believe it is an important element because it evolves around the "chicken and the egg theory". If there were more documents written in Spanish on the web, which in turn being crawled by Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Teoma and others adding them to their indices, then Hispanics would have much greater confidence in searching Spanish and finding relevant content, and therefore increasing the volume of search queries performed by this group. Someone has to start (be the "egg" so to say) and that should be the job of the search engine marketer. I never get tired of telling everyone in our industry, "Do it and you will see." For a few that I’ve seen have rolled up their sleeves to give it a try, they even think this is their new secret weapon to gaining market share. I think these are very intelligent marketers.

Then he goes on to say:

For example, studies show that many English-speaking Hispanics prefer to conduct search queries in Spanish over English when given the option; however the availability of content in both languages is equally important.

I would be very interested to see these "studies" or at least know who made them. I discussed a while back in a thread titled the "Myth of the Hispanic Market”, which makes reference to a thread in Webmaster World where I say the following.

Originally Posted by Nacho

First lets get the facts and percentages straight from page 4 of my white paper:

English Preferred.......51.7%
Bilingual...............27.1%
Spanish Preferred.......21.2%

There are two ways to see this:

1) Most Hispanics (51.7% + 27.1% = 78.8%) are comfortable or OK in browsing in English. Can you survive? Yes, maybe if they are searching in English.

2) If the other half of Hispanics (27.1% + 21.1% = 48.3%) are searching in Spanish, then will YOU search engine marketer take benefit of this segment? Clearly NO! You must do Search Marketing in Spanish plus your regular SEM to take advantage of the full 100%.

One of the key things that he mentions about doing SEO & PPC ads is this:

Remember, the Spanish language can vary from country to country. It's essential that translations are clear and can be understood by a diverse Spanish-speaking audience, keeping in mind that translations produced by automated software is often inaccurate.

Which is right! By using the word "inaccurate" I'm sure he means that words within different Hispanic cultures have different meanings. For example, the word computer translates to computadora in Mexican Spanish but it translates to ordinador in Spanish from Spain. There are many Hispanic communities around the world which I show in a chart in my first post of the Search Marketing en Espanol thread. I continue to believe the U.S. Hispanic is the best market segment due to the level of purchasing power and demonstrated ecommerce spending over the last years, now getting close to $6 billion dollars.

It's amazing how big a market can be when there is barely no competition.

[orion]

Hey, Nacho...

It appears to me your white paper was hijacked....

If I'm his boss I'll probably fire him.


Orion

[MarZ]

Nacho (and everyone else), just curious what you can say about Spain's market....in terms of this article and just your general opinion. For now getting results here is much easier than in the U.S. the amazing thing is because the market is that much behind and people/businesses are far from informed about SEO and the search industry in general, tons of SEO Spam companies are mushrooming all over the place (the ones that offer SEO for 90 euros/month).

What's worse is that these SPAM companies are partnering with a lot of domain and hosting companies, which is spreading the "evil" extremely quickly. To multiply all this, the search engines really seem to be doing very little about it here. Which makes it more of a market for spammy SEO than proper SEO, hence decreasing the quality of SERPs and feeding the machine of uninformed consumers.

[AussieWebmaster]

Originally Posted by MarZ

Nacho (and everyone else), just curious what you can say about Spain's market....in terms of this article and just your general opinion. For now getting results here is much easier than in the U.S. the amazing thing is because the market is that much behind and people/businesses are far from informed about SEO and the search industry in general, tons of SEO Spam companies are mushrooming all over the place (the ones that offer SEO for 90 euros/month).

What's worse is that these SPAM companies are partnering with a lot of domain and hosting companies, which is spreading the "evil" extremely quickly. To multiply all this, the search engines really seem to be doing very little about it here. Which makes it more of a market for spammy SEO than proper SEO, hence decreasing the quality of SERPs and feeding the machine of uninformed consumers.

It is always easier to attack a less traffic area and in this case it seems to be working well, so why would they stop? They need the engines to step in but in a small market all advertising is apprceiated. For Now!

[MarZ]

but its interesting how little the engines seem to care about the poor quality of serps that are being generated as a result of this blantant spam.
spain is an emerging market, and i realize it has a lot of room for improvement, but something like this, where there's always competition to get a foothold in the search market, why wouldn't the engines give some priority to these OBVIOUS spammers. its like a snowball effect.

[AussieWebmaster]

Originally Posted by MarZ

but its interesting how little the engines seem to care about the poor quality of serps that are being generated as a result of this blantant spam.
spain is an emerging market, and i realize it has a lot of room for improvement, but something like this, where there's always competition to get a foothold in the search market, why wouldn't the engines give some priority to these OBVIOUS spammers. its like a snowball effect.

Because most do not speak or understand the language and culture... this is fast changing but with all else that is coming in it is a hard juggle... they are basically running under it and dealing with compalints as they go.
Field Beta testing.... seems to be a rampant method of business growth online these days.

[kenpomachine]

Originally Posted by MarZ

but its interesting how little the engines seem to care about the poor quality of serps that are being generated as a result of this blantant spam.
spain is an emerging market, and i realize it has a lot of room for improvement, but something like this, where there's always competition to get a foothold in the search market, why wouldn't the engines give some priority to these OBVIOUS spammers. its like a snowball effect.

And you have an additional problem when the representatives for the Yahoo! directory are also a SEO company. You have to think they might be somewhat biased, haven't you?