How i rank in Latin America and Spain?

[Ewerton.RD]

Hi everyone!

I need to rank my site with Spanish content in Latin America and Spain. Do I choose a neutral Spanish to try to rank in every country or make content for each country? If you choose a neutral Spanish, which is the most indicated (Spain, Colombia, Mexico, other)?

[paupastorlopez]

Hi Ewerton,

I choosed spanish from Spain because I'm from Spain and my clients are from here, and they want better results for Spain than for other countries in Latin America. Some projects with this conditions have ranked well also in many countries in Latin America.

In my opinion you should choose the spanish version of the country in which you prefer better positioning, the one you have. And if you want to rank better in other countries you have to get links from those countries.

I mean, if you want to rank better in Spain, try to get good quality backlinks of your niche that are from Spain, specially those with .es and also .cat (Catalonia domain), but focus specially on .es domains or .com domains that you see that correspond to spanish people.

The same for Mexico but with .mx bakclinks. But with patience, don't build a lot of backlinks together.

Best wishes and good luck!!

[Nigel_Carr]

I think if you properly implement the hreflang tags then yes you will.

[Ewerton.RD]

Hi Nigel, thanks for your help.

We already have the domains, using /es/ and a neutral language (spanish from Bogota), but I'm seeing poor results in other countries, like Mexico and Spain.

We have one of the bests blogs in our niche in Brazil (portuguese), but we dont repeat the success in Latin America and Spain, with another domain and spanish content.

PS: we will use hreflang sitemaps soon. Do you think if that will impact positive in our rank?

Cheers!

[Ewerton.RD]

Hi Pau, thanks for your help.

So, if you need to choose the best language for a Spanish content to rank well in Spain and Latin America, you choose spanish from Spain?

At the moment, we are using a neutral spanish from Colombia (and we dont use hreflang tags yet) and I'm seeing poor results in other countries, like Mexico and Spain...

PS: we will use hreflang sitemaps soon.

Cheers!

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Ewerton

You have two choices here.

1. Set up sub-folders for each country eg

website.com/es
webiste.com/co
website.com/mx

Then use the hreflang tag on each of the pages to tell Google which language and country you are targetting.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

That is OK if you believe there are language variations for each of those countries that would make each variation appeal to them. Particularly useful if you are talking about the countries as well. the hreflang tags will ensure that neither of them variations is regarded as duplicate content. This would allow you to talk about the different countries as well.

EG

You would use x for the default .com which would not be goe-targeted in search console.

2. You could just have the Spanish website as the .com and don't geotarget using sub-folders. Then don't target country in search console. This is if you believe that everyone in all those countries will be happy to view a Spanish version that is not tailored to each country.

These are the only two choices you have because you can't multi-target using hreflang or in search console - it's either specific or not at all.

There is also a great response from Kate Morris here. (ignore all the other bs) https://moz.com/community/q/can-you-target-the-same-site-with-multiple-regional-hreflang-entries 

I hope that helps.

Regards

Nigel

[paupastorlopez]

Hi Ewerton Silva,

I managed some projects in spanish that needed good rankings in Spain and also in Latin America. I used for them a .com domain and spanish from Spain, it worked well. But I think you can also use spanish from other country like Mexico, I've seen some websites from Latin America countries that rank well in Spain. Maybe you should choose the spanish from the country in which you want to rank better of all.

I would have only one domain and make the same content for all the countries, because there are a lot of countries on latin america and its difficult to create the same but different content to a lot of countries, and you also have to create a backlink campaign for each of them and is a lot of work.

It's better if you focus your efforts on a single web, but try to build backlinks from all the countries in which you are tryin to rank.

Hope that helps!