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Next thing I heard was a mod here reporting how Overture rejected all his chosen spanish keywords - Terms Have Not Had Sufficient Searches
So what's wrong with the spanish internet?
The potential is immense: Spanishis one of the top languages on the web with some 35 Mill. active users making a rough 10% of some 332 Mill. native Spanish speakers worldwide.
Translating a site into spanish gives you Spain plus Latin America, with an added bonus of the huge spanish speaking communities in the US.
Okay, you might say, huge parts of Latin America are in deep economical problems, but still there is Spain, a stable part of the powerful western european Euro-land. Why doesn't it work out?
In the Spanish search engines [webmasterworld.com] thread members from Spain pointed to some real life experiences, that seem to highlight one of the core problems: infrastructural deficits.
To say anyhow the spanish business world doesn't go for the web would be wrong: There is telefonica, who via Terra operate worldwide and hugely successfull in the ISP/portal business.
So lets examine why the spanish speaking world lags behind - and if there is any hope for the near future?
we get traffic from a very wide range of SEs and directories...msn.mx is probably the leader, but a large number provide significant numbers of visitors
the problem I find with the Spanish speaking web is that it largely isn't a web...most Spanish only sites seem to have no external links...that can't make it easy for SEs
They wasted my time!
The tool should not show terms they will not list.
imo
This is probably the case with Overture. I imagine that their partners just don't roll in enough Spanish-searches because they just don't target them. You can see this on their keyword lists and with Mike Mackin's keyword rejections. Google and FAST are the sites that are taking in the majority of the terms. That is just too bad for Overture because Google is definitely hitting the market now. More and more searchers down in this part of the woods are falling in love with Google's results.
>>>Translating a site into spanish gives you Spain plus Latin America, with an added bonus of the huge spanish speaking communities in the US.
Unless you are in Europe, I think it should be Latin America plus Spain ;). I don't want to say Spain isn't worth it but I would target the Americas with Spain coming in second.
Eric is right, Mexico and Argentina will probably beat out Spain in the number of referrals. I don't have any concrete stats to prove this but from what I have seen and read throughout various sites, it seems to be true. From a few general test listings I had placed, there would be about 30-50 LA referrals to every one referral from Spain.
Before the DotCom bust, Argentina and Mexico were seen as the leaders in the Spanish-language web market. Various portals were spawned but like many other sites, they just couldn't draw in revenue. If you were to go back a year or two you would see portal sites point to different versions in USA, Mexico, and Argentina.
>>>the problem I find with the Spanish speaking web is that it largely isn't a web...most Spanish only sites seem to have no external links...that can't make it easy for SEs
This is also true. Many of the major Spanish sites are not search engine friendly. They are built largely on Flash and Java which makes it near impossible to have anything indexed. The web developers are extremely talented in fancy design but on the usability scale they are poor. The web surfers are not very happy with that aspect either. If you scan around the chat forums of various sites you will see endless complaints on how hard it is to find information as well as long load times. The site developers just don't seem to have a clue because most of them are operated by entertainment companies who feel that flashy graphics come first.
YupiMSN is a poor search service and people know that. Perform a few searches on their site and you will see what I mean. I'm sure there are a lot of people who use it but after a while they will give up and move on.
I am fully agree.
Having spent time mining your logs and using all tools you know it is very frustating to get that email : "Terms Have Not Had Sufficient Searches" .
What does it mean? What does it cost to Overture to accept the suggested term?
Maybe a technicians here can explain how much it does cost to Overture any new term.
Again
> The tool should not show terms they will not list.>
They could save their time too...
Then it must also be hard to find the commercial sites, which in turn would have an effect on the economy. Even in a country experiencing difficult economic times a certain percentage, particularly among the surfing population, won't be. They'll still be capable of buying, and the sites that are findable and usable will get the sales.
I've really thought for a while that there's a potential for bi-lingual Spanish sites right here in the U.S. There's a huge population, and from what I've been told they stick with native language sites. Particularly in New York and Los Angeles that I know of there are an enormous number of Spanish-speaking residents. Los Angeles has *everything* bi-lingual, even schools throughout California have bi-lingual education; it's a necessity.
Someone asked a question recently about a site he's doing for crafts imported from Latin America to be promoted here in the US. It should actually have been suggested that he do two language versions, one English and one Spanish.
There are whole web communities for ethnic-specific homepages, and the company running them hasn't had layoffs, they're hiring. Compared to layoffs in the mainstream English-language community type sites, even AOL, looking at who's hiring and who's laying off can give some sort of indication of trends.
>The site developers just don't seem to have a clue because most of them are operated by entertainment companies who feel that flashy graphics come first.
Then it seems there's a whole window of opportunity open for developers who concentrate on bi-lingual user-friendly site design, which is generally also search engine friendly. There is probably a whole untapped market waiting for just the services they need.
Amazing, wouldn't have thought. What about referrals from the hispanic community in the US?
>>>Then it seems there's a whole window of opportunity open for developers who concentrate on bi-lingual user-friendly site design, which is generally also search engine friendly. There is probably a whole untapped market waiting for just the services they need.
I totally agree. There is a whole untapped market and it is too bad that many out there are unwilling to notice it or even take advantage of the oppurtunities at hand.
I think Jupiter or IDC published some data a while ago that put Latin American users at 40-45 million by 2003. That's A LOT of web users to let waste away.
If companies do not want to target them then that's fine. It just makes things so much easier to those that do.
And 55% of online time is spent at Spanish-language sites accordng to this article:
[nua.com...]
The hispanic community in the US is believed to account for some 35 Mill. people, half of them bilingual, half dominatly spanish speaking.
More than 50% of them use the web, mostly from home access.
Now dig this:
...early adapters of the Internet in Spanish have tended to be younger "techies" who are more bilingual. "Now...Spanish-language sites are attracting users who are more Spanish-dominant." The Roslow results support the studies of many experts who have found that bilingual Hispanics are more likely to trust Spanish-language media
There's an important message in this: native languages rule! This is the same phenonomina we see in European countries, where the understanding of English is as high as in Scandinavia: people trust media in their own language more.
Apart from that the hispanic use of the web seems to come pretty close to the average US usage patterns.
Only to effectivly reach out to them you need to have a spanish site....
And that is reflected by the top portal in this segment of population: not Yahoo, not AOL, not even MSN - Terra.com is top among Hispanics.
That Roslow report makes a great read indeed.
There's an important message in this: native languages rule!
We've known that for a long time. One small observation from countries with other than English as the native language is that when some service that used to be in English is introduced in the native tongue the users who change will stick to the native.
In other words, an English language service who's losing traffic to a native language service will have to localize in order to regain that traffic.
Interesting also to note, how in one year the ratio of surfing in english compared to spanish has changed from 30/70 to 55/45.
With growing acceptance of the internet among all parts of the hispanic communities this dominance will very likely grow further.
Nothing, whatsoever. I am having an English language site translated into 12 other languages this very minute and Spanish is most definitely one of them. Even spent $$$$$ for a Spanish language dot-com made up of the single most important keyword.
The translation is surprisingly affordable, even though it involves more than just visible text, e.g. title, description, keywords and ALT-texts. I expect it to land somewhere in the region of $1000 for 124 pages, give or take a couple of C's.
Translating is definitely the way to go, and competition for prime keywords much much lighter in non-English languages. Example: My top keyword in English generates 1.260.000 hits in Google with language preference set to English, but the same keyword in Spanish only generates 71.600 hits.
One of the main reasons why companies turn their backs on the Spanish-speaking world is due to their lack of area knowledge. Economic problems tend to overshadow the fact that most of the Internet population is very well-educated. People tend to judge the population based on their geography and economic situations so therefore they feel that it just isn't worth it.
And they're right. You think the buildout of high-speed consumer networking is bad in the US? Hah! And hah again! Just wait until you see the difficulties of selling in the Spanish language markets. The problems with the Spanish-speaking markets (and this goes for Portugese as well, i.e., Brazil) are
1) Poor buildout of network infrastructure due to telco monopolies.
2) Poor buildout of high-speed network infrastructure. Many US websites are (stupidly) moving toward Flash and other chrome tech, and if not, they're adding more and more weight to each page (more links, more images). These all imply a fast network infrastructure to support it. NONE of this plays well over high-latency, low-bandwidth dialup ISP access.
Spanish may be an SE idea whose time has come, but I suspect more that it hasn't and it won't, at least, not for a long while. My experience is that most Spanish speakers using the Net are comfortable in English, and use it daily.
Is that so? And does it apply to all of Latin America?
From what I've read the typical spread of online usage is concentration in cities, with a mix of public access like from universities and internet cafes, access from job and home access.
I don't know much about the telefon market in Latin America. There have been complaints about Telefonica strangling the competiton in Spain. A deregulation seems to be an important step for mass adoption of internet.
>Many US websites are (stupidly) moving toward Flash and other chrome tech
So we know what to avoid then. Targeting a dial-up market requires slim, fast loading pages.
I've read somewhere though, engines like those too ;)
<added>
Rencke - when you say spanish was one of the languages of choice for you: did you have in mind Spain alone? And do you expect reasonable traffic from there?
Certainly not. Add all the Spanish speaking areas together and you've got a huge market. That's why I plan to add Portuguese. Portugal alone is not quite big enough as a market for us, but add Brazil.... Same argument can be made for translations into Arabic.
Google's biggest Latin American outlet to my knowledge is the partnership with UOL in Brazil, and that's Portuguese, not Spanish.
Still the predicted impressions for some generic spanish terms were very high.
Used german terms to compare with, since both languages have a similarly high percentage of languages spoken online.
Compared to roughly equivalent german terms the spanish words generally did not lag behind that much.
<added>just realized I could have come to similar conclusions easier. One look at Google Zeitgeist [google.com] would have done the trick...ah well it's late over here</added>
Sufficient Searches is defind as more than 25 per month a source told me.
That's astounding, given the great opportunities in a already huge and still fast growing market.
Also the competition seems to be far less severe than in the US or leading online markets in western Europe. Should be quite easy to gain some top spots. And translations are cheap, as Rencke has reported.
Basically, there seems to be not much "wrong with the spanish internet". Some infrastructural problems, highspeed access only just starting out in Latin America and Spain, as well as the usual physical world problems of trading across borders. With the latter not even an argument for the US members.
BTW: Msgraph has just posted a very cool way of transferring goods from the US to Latin American countries, see here:
New service for Latin American web shoppers [webmasterworld.com]
So is it merely a lack of knowledge that prevents people from promoting their e-business in Latin America, Spain and the Hispanic USA?
Targeting markets within that population can be profitable. You don't market to Cuban Americans the same way you market to Mexican Americans or Puerto Ricans. You need to pinpoint the specific market and speak to them.
If you go "generic", you will probably just offend all of them.
Well said, John. And probably the ideal solution. But when I do a smallish travel site for example, how do I offend somebody by not totally localizing it?
Also when looking at some big spanish sites, I see a lot of content that's basically the same for all local portals they are doing.
What about this approach for a start:
identify a key market you concentrate on, while at the same time submitting to all spanish engines and directories, thus testing the waters and picking up whatever comes along?
in English we are struggling to get into the top ten on Google for our most competitive single keyword...in Spanish we have had no problem going straight to number one and never having dropped out of the top three on any SE
go multilingual, it's mad not to
If you go "generic", you will probably just offend all of them."
Just like if you make an English language site, you need to do one for the states, one for the UK, one for Canada, one for Australia, one for New Zealand, one for Jamaica...?
Sorry, but I don't see how your argument fits in. Sure, if you are Pepsi or someone, you may want to have country specific sites, but for the average small to medium size website, even 2 versions is a lot. And how, exactly, do you "offend" Spanish speakers by making a website in generic Spanish? I don't understand.
I personally don't think I will offend by having a generic spanish site, just having a spanish version will indicate that we consider the market important.
thanks!
I have not come across any forums in Spanish similar to WebmasterWorld but then again I haven't looked around either :). I'm sure there are quite a few out so perhaps you can search at some of the larger portals such as Terra or Elsitio.
Note To Others: If you are aware of any other webmaster-related forums in Spanish then please refer to them by StickyMail located at the top of this screen. We should not turn this thread into an Off-topic URL drop zone for forums. Thanks :)
