Since I’ve been covering the search industry, I’ve come across quite a few people who are passionate about the industry and using it to your advantage. However, there’s one topic discussion where you can find one of SEM’s most passionate voices: the subject is Hispanic search marketing and the supporter is Nacho Hernandez.
Whenever the topic of SEM is discussed, Nacho is usually somewhere to be found correctly pointing out that marketers would do well if they paid more attention to the Hispanic population and their increasing use of the search industry. With Nacho’s help, I’ve produced a number of articles introducing concepts and practices that can better improve your site’s exposure to this demographic, as well as articles that back up Nacho’s position.
Yesterday over at SearchEngineRoundtable, Nacho posted an article containing more evidence to support his feelings on the matter. The post is called Search is HOT for U.S. Hispanics, and it looks at the increasing use of search engines by the Hispanic community and how this increase means an increased amount of targets for SEMs to consider. In a graph of the top ten web properties used by Hispanics, of which, five belong to the search engine family. This means one thing: search engine use amongst Hispanics is increasing daily, which makes them a viable audience to be marketed to.
However, there is still some work that needs to be done, as Nacho explains:
How can we (the search engine marketers) do for website owners to help accomplish growth in this market segment? There is so much content, especially Spanish content, that needs to be optimized so that search engines can understand it via their algorithms and point users in the most relevant direction. At the same time, I feel there is so much education still needed for search engine marketers to do it right.
From time to time, I come across SEMs that are *only doing translation* and applying the most typical SEO factors. This is a typical mistake when search engine optimizers or website owners only use machine translations. Seriously, it’s not that easy. Proper nouns need to be in the right sequence and verbs can be in a total different position from what a typical translation would provide. I believe it has to do more with the “relevant position” and the “keyword distribution” factors within the search engine’s algorithms.
Nacho also indicates that potential marketers need to be aware of how to use Spanish stop words correctly. The common practice when stumbling across a stop word is to remove it from your ad campaign. Although, when it comes to marketing towards Hispanics, Nacho says DO NOT DO THIS, because, “stop words are important elements of natural language and most likely analyzed as part of the raw data.”
If you are interested in learning more and you are going to the San Jose SES, Nacho will be speaking at the Spanish Language SEM Tactics, which takes place on day 4 (August 11) of the conference. Nacho’s session is scheduled for 12:45pm until 2pm. I’ll be there too (but not as a speaker).
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest search news.
