Co-Founder of Law Firm SEO Company, custom legal marketingwhich focuses on strategies in the highly competitive field of practice.
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If your law firm has bilingual staff and just advertises “se habla español” next to your phone number, you may be missing out on a huge SEO benefit.
More than 41 million people in the United States speak Spanish at home. That’s less than her 13% of the population. Spanish speakers make up nearly 30% of her population in Texas and California, respectively, and more than 20% of her in Florida.
Across the country, the Hispanic community is thriving. And since most people will need a lawyer at some point in their lives, members of this community will eventually need one too. Whether it’s starting a business, a real estate transaction, planning a property, or an unfortunate event such as a divorce or injury.
What does it have to do with search engine optimization?
It doesn’t matter what language you speak. If you need legal help, you will search online.
Phone and web browser language settings
You may remember setting up your computer, web browser, or phone and clicking through a few common questions in haste. The first question in any setup is your preferred language. From that point on, your apps and even some websites will detect your preferences and translate your experience.
If you’re familiar with your native Spanish, your web browser and phone settings may reflect it.
Dos and don’ts when optimizing your website for Spanish speakers
Now that you know that millions of people browse the web in Spanish, let’s talk about how to optimize your website for Spanish. Here are the do’s and don’ts:
Don’t rely on browser translation
Most browsers will give you the option to translate if the website loads in a different language than the browser’s default language (the language you determined when setting up your device). This is not the same as having a separate Spanish version of the site that Google can index.
While browser translation is convenient for users, it does not have the SEO benefits inherent to law firm websites.
Don’t just create a single page in Spanish
One page in Spanish is of little use.Perhaps there is a competitor that offers a large number of quality pages in Spanish. Pages are unlikely to help you compete.
don’t ignore the menu
You may decide to translate some of the pages in the practice area. This is a great start. However, translating only the body of the page and ignoring headers, menus, sidebars, footers, and other theme elements can easily navigate your site or direct users to your site who cannot use menus. will be
Translate entire site
The absolute best way is to translate the entire site. Create Spanish versions of all your pages, from your home page to practice area pages and even new content such as blog posts. All thematic elements (headers, footers, etc.) of the translated pages should also be translated so that the Spanish content of the website can be fully navigated.
This ensures that Google native Spanish content is indexed separately from English content. And with the “hreflang” tag, you can tell your visitor’s browser to automatically load the version of her website that matches their default browser settings.
There are several solutions for automatically translating content. Google Translate is probably the most popular, but you shouldn’t rely solely on automatic translation. even if google translate (or similar tools), the results should be audited by a bilingual expert to ensure that there are no nasty phrasing that may result from automated translation.
Developers may need to create alternate menus and theme content for new sections of their website.
don’t forget the details
Similar to menu and theme elements, other details can have a big impact on website conversions.For example, be sure to translate your form fields. If someone is on a Spanish page, don’t show “first name”, “last name”, “how did you get hurt?” in the form fields. These questions are presented in Spanish.
If you’re using the live chat service, make sure your introduction is in both languages. Some services may also offer the option of displaying a different greeting on the translated pages of the site.
Anything you can do to build a customized experience will help not only your conversions, but your SEO as well.
don’t forget the link
After translating the entire site, all pages should include internal as well as external links. Page permissions for these individual pages are just as important as the English pages.
Relevance is key to your inbound link building strategy. When creating links to content in Spanish, try to find sites related to the topic and link to the page.
Expect great results
Developing quality translated content that matches the scale and detail of English content, and creating authoritative links to those new pages, typically ranks for hundreds of new keywords and can be found in Spanish searches. You can even expect your map rankings to improve.
As with any law firm’s SEO efforts, success depends on doing things the right way. This always means building the best experience for your end users.
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