In This Chapter

• Succeeding in Latin America
• Using Google Search Console for geotargeting
• Making your website work in Mexico
• Operating in Brazil
• Discovering Argentina

Latin America is an important stop on our search engine optimization (SEO) world tour. Latin America includes Mexico and both Central and South America. Keep in mind that, as with the Asian region (which we talk about in Chapter 2 of this minibook) and the European Union (discussed in Chapter 3 of this minibook), the Latin American region is made up of many different countries, all with different cultures, economies, and languages. Many countries in Latin America have Spanish as their dominant language, but not all. The biggest country in South America, Brazil, speaks Portuguese.

As always, you need to do research before you launch an online business in a particular country. Hiring someone with knowledge of the local language, customs, and legal ins and outs is also an invaluable asset to your company if you are looking to expand into the Latin American region. In this chapter, you find out a bit about operating in Latin America and discover some stats on a few countries in the area. Latin America is a pretty big place, so realize that we're giving you only a peek into the region.

Succeeding in Latin America

Latin America has a population that's hungry for everything the web has to offer. Latin American countries have more than 310 million Internet users, according to eMarketer. Although 51 percent of the population in Latin America is connected, Brazil alone makes up the bulk of the Internet population, housing one-third of Internet users. Latin America has the highest number of time spent online at 7.75 hours per day. These Internet users are highly mobile and social — 45 percent of users in the region connect to social networks on their mobile device, compared to the global average of 35.5 percent.

In 2013, 80 percent of Latin Americans said they shop online, with about a third of those users reporting that they shop on their phone and a quarter saying that they use a tablet. E-commerce sales in the region hit $70 billion in 2013. Latin American shoppers are comfortable paying with credit cards online, and the average employed Chilean is reported to have more than four credit cards!

In Latin America, language matters. Results differ by including accents or using the English- or Spanish-language versions of Google. When you’re researching keywords, have someone who’s from the country you’re actually targeting help you, not just a generic Spanish speaker. The language has subtle variations based on both region and culture, and what might be a perfectly innocent word in one region might be an offensive slang term in another. For example, in Mexico, the term cajeta means a caramel dessert topping. In Colombia, it’s slang for a bodybuilder, like “meathead” in English. In Costa Rica, it means a form of low-quality marijuana. But in Argentina, it refers to female private parts. Definitely not a mistake that you want to make! These are just some examples of regional differences. Obviously, you should take great care.

If you are going to be translating your site into Spanish to target Latin American users, do have a way of getting your products to your customers! Learn from the mistakes of Best Buy Español. In November 2007, this leading North American retailer translated its site into Spanish in order to target Spanish-speaking customers. Best Buy Español was then immediately indexed (included in a search engine’s database of websites, which the search engines pull from when a user does a search) and got huge numbers of people visiting its sites. The problem was that it was showing up in the search engines in Spain and Latin America as well as in the United States, but Best Buy didn't have the ability to ship to those places! If you translate your website just for the U.S. Spanish-speaking population, be aware that you will probably draw traffic from these other countries. If you do, have a way to ship to them! Nothing is wrong with people wanting to buy things from you. Just make sure that you can provide what it is you are selling.

Also, do be aware that not all Latin American countries speak Spanish. Several countries, such as Brazil, use Brazilian Portuguese (distinct from that spoken in Portugal) as their primary language. Other countries still have a large native population that speaks their own diverse languages and dialects. Argentina, for instance, has a large German-speaking population and a large English-speaking population as well. This is something to look for when you do your research and to keep in mind when you target your keywords and create a version of your site to run in those countries.

As with expanding into any foreign market, hiring a legal expert who works in the country or region you are targeting is best. That expert helps you work out any legal issues, commerce headaches, or trade and tariff rules that you need to understand to do business in that country.

Geotargeting with Google Search Console

Google’s Search Console is designed to help you build your site, but the package also has an option that allows you to associate a website with a particular country in order to enhance that website’s presence in the particular country’s local search results. (A local search is a search geared specifically toward a user’s physical address, usually via the location of the server he’s using.)

In geotargeting, Google looks at a couple of signals to determine where a site is located or what particular region it belongs to:

• The server location of the website.
• The top-level domain (TLD). A domain is the root part of a website address, such as wiley.com. The TLD is the part that identifies where the website is registered on the World Wide Web, marked by .com, .net, and so on. In the case of international domains, the TLDs (known as country code TLDs or ccTLDs, for short) identify the country where the domain was registered, such as .us, .uk, .co.jp, and so forth.

By using Google Search Console, you can do geotargeting even if your site is hosted in Colorado. If your website aims specifically for business in Argentina, you can use the tools to have your site appear in local searches for Argentina by setting it to that country in the Tools.

For more information on geotargeting by using Google Webmaster Central, go to the Google Search Console site at www.google.com/webmasters/tools.

Working in Mexico

Mexico has approximately 50 million Internet users, meaning more than 41 percent of the country is online, and the demand for broadband Internet services is increasing. Mexico ranks twelfth in the world in terms of personal computer Internet access via high-speed fixed Internet subscriptions. These fast connections enable residents to do online searches much more effectively. Telmex is de facto the only company that provides DSL connectivity in Mexico. The government used to own Telmex and had a complete monopoly. Although the company is now privately owned, it still has near-total control.

Mexico is a signing member of 12 separate trade treaties, the most important being the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA is a trilateral trade bloc between Canada, the United States, and Mexico. This means that these three countries have agreed to eliminate tariffs, quotas, and preferences on most goods and services between them. Whatever your political views on NAFTA, it does make commerce between the United States and Mexico slightly easier if you are looking to create an e-commerce site that targets Mexico, as opposed to other Latin American countries.

As for the search engines, Google and Yahoo have versions for Mexican users: www.google.com.mx and https://espanol.yahoo.com. In fact, Google has a version for almost every Latin American country, including www.google.com.ar (Argentina), www.google.com.co (Colombia), www.google.com.pe (Peru), www.google.com.ec (Ecuador), www.google.cl (Chile), and so on.

For keyword research, add someone to your staff who both speaks Spanish and is actually from Mexico. This person can help you translate your website, pointing out cultural differences that a simple translator tool might miss and helping you effectively target your market.

You might also want to dip a toe into the YouTube (www.youtube.com) pool. Mexico and Brazil are the biggest consumers of YouTube in the world, and you have plenty of opportunity to connect with your users there. YouTube Mexico (http://mx.youtube.com) serves videos targeted at the Spanish-speaking market (see Figure 4-1).

To take advantage of YouTube’s popularity to help promote your website, upload a few Spanish-language videos on YouTube Mexico, providing links back to your own site in the sidebar, and see where this takes you. YouTube can be a very effective tool in marketing your brand and reaching a completely new audience.

Operating in Brazil

Brazil has the largest Internet population of any country in Latin America, with a total of 113 million users at last count. Brazil is a country of about 200 million people, meaning that 56 percent of Brazil’s population is online. In recent years, the increase in fixed telephone lines, cell phones, broadband access, and economic stability has afforded more Brazilians the opportunity to get online. In fact, the user growth from 2000 to 2013 was 2,095 percent. That's not a typo; it really does say that the growth exceeded two thousand percent.

A majority of the upper and middle classes in Brazil regularly use the Internet. Of the 56 percent of the population online, a large number of those people have purchasing power.

The Brazilian Internet Steering Committee has an online survey about Internet usage in Brazil. The site is available at http://cetic.br/publicacoes, in both English and Portuguese; however, survey data is provided only in Portuguese. Considering that you’ll have a Portuguese speaker on your team to help you with language and marketing, you can make use of useful survey information like this when you're starting to figure out your keywords.

Brazil is one of the nine countries in which Google has launched a local version of YouTube. As we mention in the preceding section, uploading a few videos to this video-sharing site that include links back to your web pages can get you attention and bring you more traffic.

Facebook is the most popular social media site in Brazil, and the country tops the social network’s list of highest active number of users. Brazil has 70 million active Facebook users, and as you know, using social media helps you be where your potential customers are, develop relationships, and promote brand awareness for your site. Search engine–wise, Google is the most popular.

Here are some other things to keep in mind while operating in Brazil:

• Don’t just translate your ads into Portuguese. Take into account localisms and slang.
• Provide multiple payment systems, using both credit cards and Boleto, a local bank-invoicing system.
• If you’re running an e-commerce site, be aware of the high taxes and duties that Brazil requires. Hire someone well-versed in Brazilian-commerce legal issues to help you out.

Discovering Argentina

Argentina is a Spanish-speaking Latin American country that has a large portion of its population online. The number of Internet users in the country has been estimated at 43 million in 2013, which is a whopping 75 percent of the total population. As of 2008, among the 7 million PCs registered in Argentina, the number of residential and business computers connected to the Internet totaled about 3.3 million, 92 percent of which were connected via broadband access to the Internet. Those without access to a PC at home can use Internet cafes called locutorios, so even those who don't own computers may still have online access.

The most popular search engine in Argentina is Google Argentina (www.google.com.ar), which gets 97 percent of searches.

There are also regional differences in language in Argentina. Argentinean Spanish is closer in pronunciation to Italian, and its speakers have a very distinct accent because of this. Italian is the second-most spoken language in Argentina, followed by German. In Argentinean Spanish, speakers also incorporate the usage of the pronoun vos, instead of tu, which is the informal “you.” Only a few other Spanish-speaking countries use vos, including El Salvador and Honduras.

As we always recommend, if you intend to go international and target specific countries, hire someone from that country who can help you out with the language and cultural differences. Having someone who knows the ins and outs of the language and culture on your side makes the process of expanding into the international market a whole lot smoother for everyone involved.