A search engine’s reason for being is to return search results that point to relevant content. To the extent a search engine lives up to this promise, it’s valuable. The ability to return relevant search results also directly and indirectly supports advertising based business models that generate revenue for search engine companies.

It stands to reason therefore that companies interested in reaching the online Hispanic market, whether in the US or abroad, must serve up relevant content to attract members of this audience. The Hispanic market is by no means homogeneous, though for many in the US Hispanic community, and the majority in Latin America, the Spanish language is a big factor in determining relevancy. More than half of US Hispanics prefer sites in Spanish. Spanish langauge content meets at least the first condition for relevancy, and worth, for many Hispanics.

In the world of search engine marketing (SEM) there are perhaps two camps: 1) the gamers, those who approach the pursuit of search engine ranking much like skillfully navigating a competitive video game, and 2) those who seek to add valued content, and in essence provide search engines with the content they seek to guide searchers to. Marketers in the latter group are much more philosophically aligned with the goals of search engine companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others. Their objective is to support clients in an effort to make valued content available to members of a target audience, and of course do it in a way that search engines can digest.

Developing quality Spansh language content can take time though there are several approaches to this that don’t require complete reinvention of business processes to get started:

The first, make your existing online content available in Spanish. It’s obvious I suppose. If you’re like many organizations, you have the equivalent of multiple ‘developer-years’ invested in creating your existing site. The marginal cost of making existing content available in Spanish is relatively low. You already have a website, it’s hosted, the original text has been developed. Making the text available in Spanish is basically all that’s required to make your message available to another audience (about 500 million worldwide). A professional translation company or independent translator can do the translation work quite nicely. Translation companies will likely have access to translators specializing in your organization’s business or primary activity.