Strategy
Does your business need a Spanish website?
Roughly 62 million Spanish speakers search Google.com from inside the United States. Most American businesses reach none of them, because their site is in English and their "Spanish version" is a translation widget in the footer.
That is either a large missed opportunity or an irrelevance, depending entirely on your business. Here is how to tell which.
Four questions that decide it
1. Do your customers already speak Spanish to you? If your staff switches languages at the counter or on the phone, your website is the one place you are still forcing English. That is the clearest signal there is.
2. Is your market geographically Hispanic? Not nationally — locally. In New York, Jackson Heights is 63% Hispanic with roughly 3,300 businesses. Washington Heights is known as Little Dominican Republic. Corona, Elmhurst, Sunset Park, and much of the Bronx are the same. If you serve a neighbourhood like that, English-only is a choice you are making about who walks in.
3. Is the decision made by someone other than the user? Health, education, elder care, legal, and financial services frequently involve an adult child or family member researching on behalf of someone else. That researcher may well be more comfortable in Spanish than the person they are helping.
4. Would a Spanish speaker have to trust you with something? Money, health, immigration status, a child. The higher the trust required, the more the language of the page matters — because reading terms you half-understand is not consent, it is resignation.
Two or more yes answers means build it. One yes means it depends on your margins. Zero means spend the money elsewhere, and any agency telling you otherwise is selling scope.
What "a Spanish website" actually means
There are three things people call the same thing, and they are not comparable.
| What it is | What it costs | What it earns | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Translation widget | A browser plugin that machine-translates on the fly | ~$0 | Nothing. Google treats it as low quality and native speakers stop reading in the first paragraph |
| Translated site | Your English pages, run through a translator, lightly edited | Low | Some. It reads like English wearing Spanish, and it ranks for nothing, because it targets translated English keywords |
| Written site | Pages written in Spanish, for the Spanish-speaking reader | Real | Actual traffic, from people who searched in Spanish and found something built for them |
The gap between the second and third is the one nobody explains, so here it is.
Word choice is the keyword research
A page optimised for diseño web and a page optimised for diseño de páginas web are
different pages targeting different searches. Translation software picks one at random, because
it is choosing words for meaning, not for search volume.
Multiply that across every page and you have a site that is technically in Spanish and invisible to anyone searching in it.
Regional vocabulary compounds the problem. For a US audience you want Latin American usage:
computadora, not ordenador. celular, not móvil. A site written in Spain's Spanish reads
to a US Hispanic customer roughly the way British English reads to an American — comprehensible,
and unmistakably not for them.
Register matters too. For business audiences, tú, not usted. Every competitor that
actually ranks in this market uses it.
The technical half people skip
Most bilingual sites are broken in ways that stay invisible until you notice the traffic never arrived.
hreflangmust be reciprocal. Every page declares its English and Spanish counterparts, in both directions, plusx-default. Half-paired hreflang is worse than none — Google drops non-reciprocal clusters and reports them as errors.- Use subfolders, not subdomains.
/es/keeps authority on one hostname. A separate subdomain splits it in two. - Declare the pairs in your sitemap too, not just in the
<head>. - Never auto-redirect by browser language. It breaks crawling and infuriates bilingual users, who very often want the other version.
- Research keywords separately per language. People searching in Spanish do not search translated English.
What it costs
Expect $1,500–$3,000 on top of a base project for a second language written rather than translated. It is cheapest decided on day one, because it changes the content architecture rather than sitting on top of it. Retrofitting is the expensive path.
Common questions
Can I just translate the most important pages? Yes. A partial bilingual site is fine as long as the pairing is honest — pages with a counterpart declare it, pages without stay single-language. What breaks is claiming pairs that do not exist.
Will my Spanish pages compete with my English ones? No, if hreflang is correct. It tells Google they are the same content for different audiences, so they consolidate rather than cannibalise.
Is machine translation ever acceptable? For support documentation, yes. For anything meant to sell or to establish trust, no.
How do I know if it worked? Search Console, filtered by country and query language. If Spanish-language queries appear within a few months, it worked. If they do not, the pages were probably translated rather than written.
We build bilingual sites at Riv Lux Media — written in both languages, not translated. Esta página en español →