Co-Founder of law firm SEO company, Custom Legal Marketing, focusing on strategies for highly competitive practice areas.
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If your law firm has bilingual staff and the only thing you’re doing is advertising “se habla español” next to your phone number, you could be missing out on a huge SEO benefit.
Over 41 million people in the United States speak Spanish at home. That’s just under 13% of the population. Spanish speakers make up nearly 30% of the population in Texas and California, respectively, and more than 20% in Florida.
Throughout the country, Hispanic communities are thriving. And since most people need a lawyer at some point in their lives, members of this community will eventually need lawyers too, whether it’s for starting a business, real estate transactions, estate planning or unfortunate events like divorce or suffering from an injury.
What does that have to do with search engine optimization?
It doesn’t matter what language someone speaks, when they need legal help, they’re probably going to search online.
Language Preferences On Phones And In Web Browsers
You may recall setting up your computer, web browser or phone and hastily clicking through some general questions. The first question in any setup is about your preferred language. From that point on, your apps and even some websites will detect your preference and translate your experience.
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If someone is most comfortable with their native Spanish language, their web browser and phone settings will likely reflect that.
Do’s And Don’ts Of Optimizing Your Website For Spanish Speakers
Now that we have established that millions of people browse the web in Spanish, let’s talk about how to optimize your website for them. Here are some do’s and don’ts.
Don’t Rely On Browser Translations
If a website loads in a language that is different from your browser’s default language (the one you decided on when setting up your device), most browsers will give you an option to translate it for you. That is not the same as having a separate Spanish version of your site that is indexable by Google.
The browser translation is a user convenience, but it does not give your law firm’s website any inherent SEO benefit.
Don’t Just Create A Single Page In Spanish
A single page in Spanish is nearly useless. Chances are, you have competitors that are serving up a number of quality pages in Spanish. A single Spanish page isn’t likely to help you compete.
Don’t Ignore The Menu
You might decide to translate some of your practice area pages. This is a great start. But if you’re only translating the body of your pages and ignoring the header, menu, sidebar, footer and other theme elements, you’re bringing users onto your site that will not be able to easily navigate it or use your menu.
Do Translate Your Entire Site
The absolute best approach is to translate your entire site. Create a Spanish-language version of every page, from your homepage to practice area pages and even new content like blog posts. All theme elements (headers, footers, etc.) on those translated pages should also be translated to make it easy to fully navigate your website’s Spanish content.
This will give Google native Spanish content to index separately from your English content. Also, by using the “hreflang” tag, you can tell your visitors’ browsers to automatically load the version of your website that matches their default browser settings.
There are several solutions for automatically translating your content. Google Translate is perhaps the most popular, but you shouldn’t rely on automated translations alone. Even if you let Google Translate (or a similar tool) do your translation, a bilingual professional should audit the results to ensure there isn’t any awkward phrasing that may result from an automated translation.
A developer may need to create alternative menus and theme content for the new sections of your website.
Don’t Forget The Details
Just like your menu and theme elements, other details can have a huge impact on your website conversions. For example, make sure you translate your form fields. If someone is on a Spanish page, your form fields shouldn’t say “First name,” “Last name” and “How were you injured?” Those questions should appear in Spanish.
If you’re using a live chat service, make sure the introduction is in both languages. Some services may also offer the option to display a different greeting on the translated pages of your site.
Anything you can do to build a tailored experience will help you with conversions as well as SEO.
Don’t Forget About Links
After you’ve translated your entire site, all of your pages need to have internal links pointing to them as well as external links. The page authority of these individual pages is equally important as the English pages.
Relevance is key to your inbound link-building strategy. When building links to your Spanish content, make sure you find topically relevant sites to link to your pages.
Do Expect Fantastic Results
If you develop quality translated content that matches the scale and detail of your English content, plus build authoritative links to those new pages, you can usually expect to rank for hundreds of new keywords and even see improvements in your map rankings for Spanish searches.
Like other law firm SEO efforts, success depends on doing things the right way, which always means building the best experience for the end user.
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Author: Jason Bland, Forbes Councils Member
