Local SEO: Spain - having trouble getting to first page

[advertisingcloud]

Dear, Moz community

We are an online advertising website / direcotry. Lately we discovered that our website due to technical error was in English rather than Spanish and was not ranking in the local Spanish google.es at all. After changing the main language we quickly climbed to 2nd page with rankings in google.es .

**My question is on top of regular SEO (Link building, content, blog) what could we do to help us rank quicker in local google.es. **

The same keyword ranks in google.com as #3 but not in Spain. Should we put in the effort to work with local directories? Google MyBusiness is not an option as we are not a bricks and mortar business.

[MikeGracia]

Tricky one to answer without knowing more details really to be honest, but here's some things to consider:

• Do you have many backlinks from decent, Spanish websites? If not, I'd have a think about how to get some (don't go for low quality of course!).
• You say you're not a bricks & mortar business, but do you have a Spanish address & phone at all? If so, do you have any citations? Are there (again, decent/quality) sites you can get the site listed on?
• How's your international SEO set-up? For example, geographical targeting in Search Console for the domain or subfolder/subdomain (/es set to Spain, unless Spain is the default, in which case Spain set as the target for the entire domain), hreflang settings...
• How well is your Spanish SERP snippet (title & description) optimised for CTR? Can you make any changes (without negatively affecting SEO) to increase your click through rate from the search results? (Think good, enticing wording in your < title > tag, a decent meta description that pulls-in folk's interest).

Just a few thoughts

[Roman-Delcarmen]

If you want to rank for local you should try to implement schemas at your website. Another option is to make a research of your competition. So if you are in the second position why don't you are making a research about the first place? backlinks / anchor text / referring sites.

Instead of trying to optimize everything, I always try to optimize those factor that will help to beat the competitor next to me on the top.