SEO in Spanish: make your site sound local
Your Spanish site brings in a fraction of the enquiries your English pages do, and every page on it looks right. The next step is making it sound local, because buyers contact the supplier who sounds like one of them.
Get it right and a "promising" market becomes a paying one. And Spanish is several markets: a page written for Madrid speaks to Madrid, and Mexico City buyers want one written for them.
Below: where Spanish sites win buyers and what to do first, as part of an effective SEO strategy for markets outside English.
Research keywords country by country
The words your buyers type decide whether they find you, and in Spanish they change at every border. A keyword list researched for each country ranks you in the countries you wrote for.
Trainers are "zapatillas" in Spain but "tenis" in Mexico. The verb "coger" (to take or grab) is everyday Spanish in Spain and vulgar in Argentina and Mexico. Vocabulary shifts within Spain too: what Valencians call "bajoca" (green beans), Madrileños know as "judías verdes", a reminder that Spain also has co-official languages such as Valencian and Catalan.
So selecting appropriate keywords means research per country, and keyword research done region by region from the start is the cheapest way to build pages that last.
One language, many cultures
A buyer who recognises local references keeps reading as a buyer. As Vera Content puts it, "Spanish SEO requires an insider's knowledge of the Spanish-speaking market you're targeting", whether that is a Hispanic market or a European one.
Holidays, shopping seasons and buying habits differ between Madrid, Mexico City and Buenos Aires, and content built around them reads as local, on top of the quality of the Spanish.
Show each country its own page
Get the technical set-up right and Google shows your Mexican page to a searcher in Mexico City and your Spanish page to one in Madrid. The set-up is well understood: correct hreflang tags, region-specific URLs, and metadata translated and optimized for each target market. Getting them right across several countries at once takes a Spanish SEO agency that knows the regional differences.
Answer the questions Spanish buyers ask
Localized content answers the questions Spanish buyers ask, which differ from your English buyers' questions. Effective Spanish SEO adapts tone, style and even the topics themselves to suit local preferences and search intent.
Start with the size of the audience
The size of the audience is why getting the Spanish right pays back more than in almost any other language.
Los hablantes potenciales de español sobrepasan los 630 millones en todo el mundo. La comunidad con dominio nativo de la lengua española supera en 2025 por primera vez los 500 millones de hablantes y llega hasta los 520 millones. (Potential Spanish speakers exceed 630 million worldwide; native speakers passed 500 million for the first time in 2025, reaching 520 million.)
Source: Instituto Cervantes, El español en el mundo, Anuario 2025, "20 claves del español en el mundo"
Spanish is spoken across Latin America, Spain and the US, is an official language of the EU and the UN, and is well established online, so your competitors are publishing in it already.
El porcentaje de páginas web con contenido en español es el segundo más alto del mundo, si bien a gran distancia del número de páginas en inglés. (Spanish has the second-highest share of web pages of any language, though far behind English.)
Source: Instituto Cervantes, El español en el mundo, Anuario 2025
Check which search engines each market uses
Where your buyers search decides where your effort goes. Google dominates across the Spanish-speaking world, its lead varies by country, and Bing matters more in some markets than others.
Google’s share of search in August 2026: Spain 94.81%, Argentina 93.89%, Colombia 93.31%, Mexico 88.54% (where Bing holds 9.08%).
Optimize for Google first, then check Bing Webmaster Tools for markets such as Mexico, where the second engine is big enough to be worth the extra hour. Bing also powers Microsoft Copilot, which adds to its weight.
Know who you compete with in each market
Your competitors in Spain are often different from the ones you face at home. Local players and brands that have already localized hold the positions you want, and they differ by country. Map them market by market with an SEO competitor analysis in Spanish, before you decide what to publish.
Win positions now while the audience grows
The audience is still growing, so a position won now keeps paying. Spanish ranks among the top languages used on the internet, and the Instituto Cervantes counted 30 million more potential Spanish speakers in 2025 than a year earlier. Internet World Stats publishes older estimates of internet users by language, which are worth reading with their date in mind.
SEO lets smaller firms compete with larger ones and reaches Spanish-speaking buyers cost-effectively.
Decide which Spanish to serve first
A Spanish site that fits each of its markets wins buyers in all of them. It starts with one decision, which Spanish for which buyers. Our Spanish SEO runs Spain directly from Valencia, with Latin American variants written by native copywriters in Santo Domingo.
Book a call about your Spanish markets and tell us which ones matter most to you.
