Spanish SEO For Lawyers in 2024
Spanish search engine optimization (SEO) for lawyers is a strategy to improve your firm’s visibility for Spanish speaking audiences. It begins with Spanish keyword research and creating relevant content for the Hispanic audience.
Indeed in the legal industry, Spanish SEO is often overlooked. Today, let’s look at how to kick off the strategy for your firm. But if you need some convincing, here’s:
Why Law Firms Should Consider Spanish SEO?
Kristaps Brencans, CEO at On The Map Marketing, reckons that Spanish SEO is an “often underutilized local SEO strategy.” Owing to the strategy we were able to increase the organic traffic of a law firm by 600% in six months.
Here are some of its top advantages:
- Low-competition, high-value transactional keywords. As of this writing, Spanish SEO keywords are in a sweet spot where they’re both highly underutilized (lower competition) and emerging in terms of search volume.
- Build your authority to the local Hispanic demographic. Spanish SEO can also elevate your law firm’s reputation and credibility in your local market, especially in the eyes of the Spanish-speaking community.
- Leverage a higher client close rate. A Thomson Reuters report shows that Spanish speakers are distinctly more likely to “seriously consider” hiring attorneys they find online than everyone else.
Is Spanish SEO Beneficial For Your Practice Area?
Rather than worrying about service-market fit, it’s better to be mindful of your market demographics.
“It’s really up to the market rather than the service,” says On The Map Associate SEO Director, Adrian Gas. He has experience spearheading local SEO campaigns for law firms—also for the Hispanic market.
“Almost any service and type of law firm can benefit from targeting the Spanish-speaking market if there’s a large enough population in their location,” he added.
It doesn’t matter if you’re in criminal defense, personal injury, or immigration law—you might be surprised at the surge of online searches for various legal services coming from the Hispanic audience.
Spanish SEO Tips for Law Firms
And, without further ado, here are the top seven Spanish SEO tips that will help you tap into the Hispanic community:
1. Revisit Your Google Business Profile Service Options
Optimize your Google Business Profile to make sure the Spanish-speaking audience knows that your firm has a multilingual staff.
This particular strategy can be executed quickly in three steps. First, make sure you enable the “Spanish” language assistance option on your profile.
You can find your profile’s service options at the bottom of your business information window. Just click the “edit” button next to “Service Options,” click ‘Yes’ next to “Spanish,” and save your changes.
The next step is to sprinkle hints of Spanish language support in your Google Business Profile description. It can be as short and simple as “¡Se habla español!” or an entire paragraph explaining your services in Spanish.
Finally, implement strategies to get more Google Business Profile reviews from your past Spanish-speaking clients. The key is to reach out to your clients, make it convenient for them to submit reviews, and respond to them cordially.
Having and responding to Spanish reviews on your profile signals that you’re not just adding Spanish service support to get attention. It proves that language isn’t a barrier to the success of your legal services, and that you value the feedback of all your clients regardless.
2. Work with a Bilingual Specialist
Having a dedicated, in-house bilingual specialist is a game-changer for Spanish SEO, especially when it comes to content creation.
It’s understandable for most businesses to think of automated translation services or AI tools. They’re cheaper, faster, and can actually lead to some SEO results with the right tactics.
But for law firms where forging personal connections with clients is paramount, it’s nowhere near enough. Not to mention that Hispanic clients will probably expect to talk with another Spanish speaker if you promote content in their language.
“Even though AI does a good job at translating text content, it will lack the human feeling and the use of everyday language or slang for your target audience,” says Gas. “Spanish is broadly spoken around the world and differently depending on the country, so you’ll want to use the best natural variation for your target audience.”
Hiring a bilingual SEO specialist locally is the way to go. You can also use marketplaces like Upwork to find Spanish-speaking consultants and contractors to fill the position faster.
You can also consider working with a multilingual agency with Spanish speakers who are already seamlessly embedded in the company culture. More importantly, you need specialists with a proven track record of success in the legal field.
3. Create a Spanish Subfolder in Your Domain
Another prerequisite for a successful Spanish SEO campaign is to create a subfolder for all your Spanish content.
This makes it easier to manage posts, configure plugins, and establish a more defined site structure that helps search engines understand which content is for Spanish users.
A subfolder or subdirectory is a smaller folder within your website’s main directory, like “www.yourlawfirm.com/es/.”
You can do this manually through your web hosting account. Or, if you’re using WordPress, use a plugin like Polylang to streamline the creation of subfolders as well as other backend processes for Spanish SEO.
When setting up Polylang, make sure you add all variations of Spanish you intend to cover. Just select the right variation from the drop-down menu and click ‘Add new language.’
Note: Be sure to select the “English” option first to make it your website’s main language.
By default, Polylang will automatically use a subfolder whenever you create new translations for your posts or pages. You also have the option to use a subdomain instead on the plugin’s settings page.
To translate a new page to Spanish, just go to your WordPress dashboard’s “Posts” or “Pages” section, and click the “Add a translation in Español” button (plus icon).
Although Polylang has automatic translation features, be it through DeepL Translate or another plugin, it’s highly recommended that you work with your bilingual specialist to translate content manually.
“As convenient as this (automatic translations) may look at first, it’ll most probably end up causing many obstacles when trying to optimize or create new original Spanish content,” says Adrian Gas.
At this point, most law firms don’t really need to translate all their content to Spanish for SEO purposes. Just start with the pages related to practice areas that the Hispanic community are looking for.
4. Use ‘hreflang’ and canonical tags
If you use Polylang, take note that the plugin already takes care of nearly every technical SEO issue that comes with translations.
This includes the ‘hreflang’ tag, which informs Google that your page is in a specific language.
Polylang also automatically plugs in a canonical tag to the original page upon translation. This tells Google that the specified URL is the original copy of the content — thus, preventing false duplicate content flags from harming your SEO.
Here’s an example of a canonical tag:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.youroriginalpage.com/”>
Again, without Polang or a similar plugin, you’ll need to add these tags to your content yourself. Just remember that the ‘hreflang’ tag is for translations, whereas the canonical tag is for the original content prior to translation.
5. Research Spanish SEO Keywords
Thus far, we’ve covered steps that will help you optimize existing websites and content for Spanish SEO.
Let’s take things up a notch by publishing content that will increase your rankings in Spanish search engine results.
If you think there’s an untapped market of Spanish speakers in your location, the step is to conduct keyword research with a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs. The trick is to translate your practice area into Spanish and add your location.
For example, if you’re an immigration law firm, you can start with the seed keyword “abogado de inmigracion” while adding your location.
Tip: You can use keyword research to determine the demand for certain topics from Spanish speakers. Use this information to decide which content or pages to prioritize for translation.
Don’t forget to diversify your keyword pool by looking at related terms for keywords with a reasonable search volume. In most tools, clicking on a keyword opens a report that contains these related searches.
For even more keyword ideas, look at Google Autocomplete suggestions or “People also ask” questions in search results.
Once you have your Spanish keywords, use them just like your regular SEO keywords. Build content around them, insert them in meta descriptions,
6. Publish Website Content for Your Spanish-Speaking Audience
Using keyword research, you—with the help of your bilingual specialist—should be able to come up with a handful of new topic ideas that your law firm website hasn’t covered yet.
Original Spanish blog posts help you generate more Hispanic leads and win their vote of confidence. And since you’re targeting low-competition and cost-effective Spanish keywords, these will also elevate your law firm’s overall search engine rankings much faster.
“The more you rank for Spanish informational keywords and the higher your relevancy for those topics, the better you’re going to rank for commercial or ‘money’ terms,” according to Adrian Gas. “Not to mention creating Spanish articles is also a potential lead channel by itself.”
To ensure that your content is optimized for Spanish search, we recommend using an SEO tool like Surfer. It can work as a Google Docs plugin, allowing you to obtain suggestions for keywords, word count, number of images, subheadings, and more.
7. Obtain Backlinks from Relevant Spanish Websites
The next and final step is to start building up your backlink profile with links from authoritative Spanish websites.
Remember that link building for SEO has always required a holistic approach in terms of looking for potential backlink sources, submitting guest content, and tracking results. Adding Spanish SEO to the mix only requires looking for Spanish websites in the U.S. that can get you backlinks.
Most (but not all) of them are in the “travel” and “news” verticals. To find other authoritative sites that can provide high-quality backlinks, a highly effective strategy is to do competitor research.
Using a tool like Ahrefs, you can easily reveal your competitor’s Spanish backlink sources. Just enter their domain in the “Site Explorer” tool, go to the backlinks report, and filter the results to show Spanish websites only.
Sift through your competitor’s backlink sources to find sites you can target, including blogs in Spanish, legal directories, and other firms that are in a different legal practice. Also, look at metrics like Domain Rating (for Ahrefs) and Authority Score (for Semrush) to prioritize sites that can give you the biggest boost.
As a parting tip, remember that competitor research can also be used for the following aspects of your Spanish SEO and legal marketing:
- Looking for Spanish content ideas that get a lot of traction
- Finding potential SEO keywords you may have missed
- Identifying other competitors that target Spanish users
- Uncovering Spanish pay-per-click (PPC) keywords
Tap Into the Spanish-Speaking Community Fast
Spain SEO is a great opportunity for your firm to expand your online presence, supercharge your organic traffic, and rake in more potential clients.
It’s not exactly a highly technical endeavor, but it takes time and resources to find and capitalize on the underserved Spanish keywords in your niche.
If you’re looking for proven experts who can kickstart your Spanish SEO efforts, look no further than On The Map Marketing,
Get a free consultation to discuss Spanish SEO or our other types of digital marketing services!
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