Check out our 5 easy tips to help you translate your website into Spanish.

Hispanic marketing is critical for just about every company and organization in North America. In the United States alone, more than 50 million people can speak

Spanish. (that’s more than Spain!) Not to mention the millions upon millions of Spanish speakers in Latin America–an important and growing market.

Essentially, this means that in 2020 your website should be Spanish-friendly. But what does it mean exactly to have a “Spanish-friendly” website? It means having a few key elements in place so your organization can speak to Spanish-speaking constituents in a way that resonates. A Hispanic marketing agency can help you with this if you don’t already have the culture and linguistic knowledge in-house.

That doesn’t mean you necessarily have to use English to Spanish translation services to translate your entire website into Spanish. That approach is important for many organizations with a heavy focus on Hispanic Americans or Latin America, and that might be what you’re looking for. But if that’s not you, there are a few easy-to-implement tips that can help you reach Spanish speakers on your website.

1. Clearly define your goals and objectives

This is an important first step that will set the stage for all content you produce in nSpanish. It may sound obvious, but the first thing you need to do is to ask yourself exactly why your company or organization wants to reach Spanish speakers. Clearly defining these goals is going to help you determine the basis for your Spanish-language content strategy, what types of content you’ll produce in Spanish and the amount of Spanish content you’ll need. Basically, it’s really important to be clear on this before you get started.

The reasons you need Spanish content will likely vary depending on the type of business or organization you are and what your primary incentives for Hispanic marketing. You might be raising money for a new community project, looking for distributors in Mexico, trying to get the word out about the services you offer or are simply wanting to be inclusive of an important part of your community. Your goals and objectives will inform how you approach more than just website content. They will help determine your overall communications strategy, outreach initiatives, fundraising—even staffing. But we can take this one step at a time.

2. Scale appropriately

Now that you’ve clearly set your goals and objectives, you can start prioritizing what content you need in Spanish. If you’re still reading, it’s likely that you don’t need to translate your entire website into Spanish. Often, a handful of pages (or even just one) can suit your needs.

One approach that often works well for organizations starting out small with Spanish web pages is to create a single landing page that includes highlights of various programs and initiatives. Linking out to English-language pages is absolutely fine, but you should make sure to clearly indicate that the person is about to navigate away from Spanish-language content.

As you grow your Hispanic marketing strategy, you can build out your webpages to offer more relevant content for your audience. Several of our clients work at this slowly and track their progress along the way. This helps cost and workload reasonable while allowing an informed and strategic approach to scaling up Spanish content.

3. Make it easy to find

All too often, organizations hide the link to Spanish content at the bottom of the homepage (or at the bottom of a secondary page). Even if Spanish speakers make a relatively small portion of your visitors to your website, you still want to make sure it’s prominent enough to found.

Of course, the best way to make sure your Spanish content is accessible is to make sure it’s searchable, both on your website and from search engines like Google. A good Hispanic marketing agency can help you build search engine optimization in Spanish if that’s not something your organization already has the expertise to undertake.

4. Create quality content

You should take the same care in creating engaging, web-friendly content in Spanish as you have for the rest of your site in English. You may have a volunteer or staff member who has a high level of Spanish, but are they writers? Do they have experience writing for the web? If this isn’t a skill set you have in-house, a partner like Press 2 can be a great asset.

One of the most important things to keep in mind when creating good Spanish content is that it doesn’t follow the same rules as English. Title case in Spanish is completely different than any writing style you would find in the English language. Also, how you address the reader, length of the content and general style differ–sometimes significantly. Someone with skills and experience for writing Spanish web content is critical to get this right.

5. Keep it fresh

Set a schedule for how often the content needs to be reviewed and refreshed. Especially if your Spanish-speaking audience is relatively small, it can be easy to forget this content. Unless you’re promoting news or events on your site, chances are there won’t be frequent or extensive changes. Once your content is in place, it might only be a matter of revisiting it once every few months.

As I mentioned before, you can scale up as you go. Try out some Spanish content on your website and measure how it performs. Keep it updated and create new content as necessary.

Contact us for a free consultation on how to optimize your website for a Spanish-speaking audience.