Spanish Content/Spanish Speaking Target

[Larry Linson]

My lawyer client wants to target the Spanish-speaking population in her website. I have looked here at the conversations on the topic, but they appear to have been centered on addressing different regions or countries in the url structure. My client is a local business, addressing only one region. She just wants to attract Spanish only speakers in her service area (a major metropolitan area). My client's website is in WordPress so perhaps the easiest way would be a plugin that translates a page. She tried to set it up on her own and it was not, however, easy. Also wondering about the weakness of this "easy" solution - quality of translation, and the fact that an individually crafted Spanish page would afford a better translation, and perhaps the chance to tailor content to the Spanish-speaking client. She is open to the Spanish content being more limited initially - not obsessed with getting "the whole thing" in Spanish.

If "hand-crafted" is best what would be the best website url structure? I really don't want to set up a separate spanish only website, though I am open if it merits consideration. Thanks.

 

[Eric Rohrback]

I'm not super well versed in international SEO, but I think depending on the region and whether the client is just translating current content from english to spanish then you would need to be mindful of not only URL structure but also hreflang directives.

Use Google's documentation as a starter guide.

The browser translators are good, but not great. They'll mess up in some weird ways from time to time, so it's always better to have the content translated by a fluent/native speaker.

Assuming your client is in the US, you probably just need to set up the language/region codes of:
es-us
en-us

So the alternate codes you'll need to add to the site would look something like:

<link rel="alternate" href="https:// www.example.com" hreflang="es-us" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https:// www.example.com" hreflang="en-us" />