Search visibility increase with international SEO

[Brian_Dowd]

Hi Moz Community,

I am wondering if there is any tool and/or any sort of standard increase in search visibility I can assume that we will have with our website if we expand to start targeting Spanish with our site.

At the moment we receive about 6000-7000 visits a day with 75% of that coming from the US and UK. I am wondering is there any way to make a rough assumption on visibility that will increase by launching a new Spanish speaking website. It would be a subdirectory, not a subdomain or gTLD. I am struggling to find a concrete answer on this and i'd like to make a semi-accurate forecast of the traffic we can expect based on the increase in search visibility that our Spanish language site will provide us.

Thanks

[Mobilio]

I believe that noone can give you answer. But let's try!

US population is 318.9 million (2014). UK population is 64.1 million (2013). This make very rough 383 million.
Hispanic or latino population in US is approx 54M. http://www.cdc.gov/minorityhealth/populations/REMP/hispanic.html

Now let's count all spanish talking in the world. This is Spain + whole South/Latin America except Brazil (they talk in Portuguese). Latin America is 626M (2015 est.), Brazil is 200M (2013) and Spain is 46.77M (2014). So rough calculation there will be 472.77M.

As you can see with this translation you can effective double your potential audience. As you can see i talk about "potential audience" because there are many things can goes wrong. But maybe in long term (this is shoot in the dark!) this can double (or even more) your traffic in best scenario. Or (again shoot in the dark) this can bring you 15% increase (US-hispanic+UK/US+UK population). Of course both are very rough assumptions.

[Brian_Dowd]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the answer. I had a feeling there would be a lot of shooting in the dark here, but I thought maybe there was some more surefire way to go about this, but I guess that is the nature of forecasting. Thanks again for the answer.

Brian

[Mobilio]

Well - true. This is true forecasting w/o market evaluation.

For example - your site can be for local business. Can Latin America visit it? No, but local hispanic or latin residents can visit it.
Or you can sell something expensive - RollsRoyces, Teslas, or Elon Musk's Rockets. Can latin america audience interested about this? Probably.
Or you can share them Taco's recipes - YES! They will be interested.

There is special market evaluation reports but this report will take months and will be expensive. It's more accurate, but it's also shoot in the dark.

One thing that definitely will happen - your traffic will rise. You can evaluate using KeywordPlanner and special keywords on Spanish how is monthly searches of them. It's easy - go in search console and grab your best keywords for searches. Like Top100 of them. Translate them to Spanish and then go in KWP paste them and watch monthly searches about them. You also can compare English KW vs. Spanish KW as difference.

[Brian_Dowd]

Thanks again Peter. Will try that out. I have actually done all the keyword preparation and SEO stuff, it is really just a matter of building the thing now. But I will give that a try again and get the numbers and see.

Basically, what I was trying to do was get an idea of how much more visibility we will have in Latin America and Spain with a Spanish language specific site since as I understand it, that would give us more visibility where people search with language/country specific versions of Google (such as Google.es vs. Google.com and Google.co.uk). If I could get some kind of percentage I could apply that to what we currently get from those areas and get a better idea of what kind of increase in traffic we should get, but I figured it wouldn't be that easy.

Thanks again and if you have any other suggestions, keep 'em coming.

[Mobilio]

Well on mine first answer there is number for 54M population of hispanic/latin in US. But you can't know how many of them do searches in english or in spanish?

I can talk about Bulgarians. Even if they migrate to other country they still talk in Bulgarian in home, watch Bulgarian TV, read online Bulgarian newspapers, purchases Bulgarian goods. And more interesting - they still search in Bulgarian. Example - even if google.co.uk you can get Bulgarian searches and results. Real case - a friend of mine own TV repair service center and get phone call from London about TV repair. Just lady's there want to find someone to fix his mother TV. Funny - distance between service center and home was almost 100-200 meters.

You don't know what you don't know...