SEO in Spain

Spain is one of the largest countries in Europe, located in its western part. 94% of its entire population, i.e. 47 million, have access to the Internet. The perspective of conquering such a large online market has really big potential.

Spain is an extremely interesting country, not only in terms of its cultural and linguistic diversity, but also in terms of e-consumer behaviour. Spaniards are very much in favour of shopping locally. From a business point of view, this means that entering this market is highly difficult for foreign players, but not impossible. With a properly prepared SEO360® strategy tailored to the needs of your business, we will help you gain high positions in the Spanish market.

What do you need to know about positioning in a multilingual country? It is certainly necessary to take into account the different varieties of the language spoken by its inhabitants. In Spain, the main official language is Castilian, which is commonly referred to as Spanish. In addition, there are four regional languages which also have official status:

• Catalan,
• Basque,
• Galician,
• Aranay.

Interestingly, Spanish is the third most popular language online in the world (after English and Mandarin). All regions of Spain have a strong regional identification, manifested in the language used, accent, cuisine, cultural customs and more.

What operating systems do Spaniards use? When it comes to desktop devices, Windows is the clear leader:

• Windows (78%),
• macOS (14.62%),
• Chrome OS (2.8%).

On mobile devices, Android is as popular as Windows on PC:

• Android (78.26%),
• iOS (21.16%),
• Samsung (0.56%).

As for browsers, according to the 2021 StatCounter ranking, the leader is also Chrome by Google:

E-commerce market in Spain

76% of Spanish Internet users declare shopping online. In the coming years, e-commerce channel sales are expected to grow at a rate of 7.9% per year, which means that in 2024 the value of the market should increase by nearly 27 billion US dollars. As you can see, the potential is huge.

The statistical Spanish e-consumer is most often a person aged between 31 and 45, with a university degree and living in a large city. Nevertheless, experts point out that the biggest influencers of the e-commerce market are consumers aged 16–30.

The clear leader among the most popular industries in online shopping is fashion. 95% of Spanish e-consumers declare interest in this particular industry. Other significant e-commerce categories in Spain are electronics, home furnishings and toys.

E-commerce trends have been heavily influenced by the pandemic, especially in the area of fresh product purchases. While this segment accounted for only 2% of the Spanish market prior to the coronavirus outbreak, its share is now around 3.5%. However, purchases of travel services, transport and ticket sales, which were e-commerce leaders in Spain before the pandemic-related restrictions, have seen a significant decline.

Many small and local businesses (e.g. restaurants) in Spain decided to go online to stay afloat during the lockdown period. Interestingly, many of them use only WhatsApp to sell online, without necessarily even having a website.

Interesting facts about the Spanish e-commerce market:

• a Spaniard spends an average of 75 euros on online shopping,

• the favourite payment method is by credit card,

• before making a purchasing decision, Spaniards like to use price comparison sites.

Why start promoting your business in Spain?

If you want to increase your company’s profits and establish an international presence, think today about starting your SEO efforts in the emerging and developing Spanish market, with an ever-increasing number of e-consumers. Why positioning? Find out below:

• A high position in search results will contribute to building a positive image for your company, as well as its reputation in a high-potential European market.

• With a high search engine position, you will earn more trust from customers, thus improving your sales and profits.

• By starting your SEO efforts in the Spanish language, you can gain global reach.

• Apart from acquiring customers who live in Spain, your website content can be accessed by other Spanish speakers, such as the population of Latin America.

• Positioning in Spain will give you a competitive advantage over other businesses selling similar products or services in your industry.

Link building in Spain

Link building activities are an immensely important and indispensable part of the entire positioning strategy. When properly planned and systematic, it will guarantee your company’s success in any foreign market. How should you conduct effective link building in Spain?

Use the following valuable tips:

1. Link domain

Remember to make sure that your strategy includes acquiring links with a domain appropriate for a given country: in this case mainly links with the “.es” extension, representing the national domain of the Kingdom of Spain.

2. Diversification of links

When conducting link building activities in Spain, you need to take care of acquiring links from various sources. Thanks to this, search engine robots will read the links as more natural, which translates into increased safety of our operations.

The following are the most popular link acquiring methods on the Spanish market:

Creating valuable content

Creating valuable and relevant content on your website may become a “natural” method of acquiring links. A user who reads the content posted on your website and finds it worthy of attention or recommendation is more likely to share the link to your website on their own website, blog or social media channels.

Reviews

The most popular way to get reviews and acquire links to your website is to work with a well-known Spanish blogger/YouTube user who will test your product and post a review with a link to your website.

Link exchange

Link exchange is a common method which, simply put, means that you offer to post a link to someone else’s website if they do the same for you, a win-win situation.

Guest articles

By publishing a text as its author on popular industry portals, you can achieve a double benefit: first, you will build your image online by publishing relevant content; second, by mentioning your website or your bio in the content, you will acquire an additional link to your website.

Interviews

As above, giving an interview can be a way to achieve a double benefit: self-promotion and acquiring a link to your website.

Sponsored articles

This method is extremely common among link building activities. Creating and publishing a high quality, relevant text about your products or services is an excellent method of acquiring links in Spain and, at the same time, building brand awareness and increasing brand recognition on the market. However, you should remember that publishing sponsored articles on popular, quality external portals is expensive, so you should allocate an appropriate budget for such activities.

Creating your own SEO resources

Creating content using your own SEO resources costs money but brings great benefits. What exactly are SEO resources? It is a website (or a collection of websites) that contains content from a particular industry and links to positioned pages. This method of link acquisition will allow you to link your main website.

Buzz Marketing

Buzz marketing means creating and publishing short posts on online forums with a link to your website.

3. Quality of links

Another important aspect is the quality of the acquired links. It goes without saying that, in order to catch up with the competition, we have to acquire as many links as possible without forgetting about their quality. One link from an impactful Spanish domain may bring us more benefits than a thousand links acquired from poor quality websites.