Service 04 of 06
Bilingual SEO in Miami
A large part of this county searches in Spanish, and the Spanish version of almost every service term is competed for far less systematically than the English one. Search both versions of your own service. The two result pages often have almost nothing in common.
The problem
The half of Miami your competitor cannot see.
Most agencies start in English because that is what the tools default to, then translate. Translation is where it breaks, because people do not search in translations. The literal Spanish rendering of your service is frequently not the phrase anyone types, and the phrase they do type has a different set of competitors, a different intent and often a fraction of the difficulty.
There is also a variety problem. Spanish written for Spain reads as foreign here, and the specific words for trades, parts and processes differ enough that using the wrong ones costs you both the ranking and the credibility. Miami Spanish is its own thing, with Cuban, Venezuelan, Colombian and Argentinian layers in it, and a page written by someone who has not listened to it sounds like a brochure.
Then there is the technical half, which is where most bilingual sites quietly lose. Done wrong, your two versions compete with each other for the same searches instead of reinforcing each other — and the most common causes are an hreflang that points at a URL that does not exist, or one that is not reciprocated.
What is included
What actually gets done
Keyword research done twice, from scratch
The Spanish list is built from Spanish searches, not from the English list run through a translator. They routinely disagree about which service even has demand.
Written in Miami Spanish
Written, not translated, in the variety people here actually use, with the trade vocabulary that matches. If your customers are mainly Cuban or Venezuelan, that shows in the wording.
hreflang that is correct and reciprocal
Every alternate declared in both directions and pointing at a URL that exists. A one-way tag, or one aimed at a 404, gets the whole relationship discarded and it happens constantly.
Two versions that do not compete
Canonicals, internal links and structure arranged so the two languages accumulate authority together instead of splitting it and cannibalising each other.
Profile, reviews and posts in both
The Google Business Profile description, services, posts and Q&A published in both languages, and reviews answered in the language they were written in.
Ads separated by language
When there are campaigns, English and Spanish run as separate campaigns with their own landing pages and budgets. Mixed into one, the cheaper language quietly eats the budget and the data becomes unreadable.
How it runs
Four steps, every month
Find out which language your money is in
Both versions of your main services searched and compared: volume, competition and what is actually ranking. Sometimes the answer is not the one the owner expected.
Fix the plumbing first
hreflang, canonicals, URL structure and the profile. Cheap to do, and it is what stops the two versions from working against each other.
Write the weaker side properly
Usually Spanish, occasionally the reverse. Written from its own research, by someone who works in that language every day.
Report the two apart
Rankings, traffic and enquiries split by language, always. Averaged together they hide exactly the thing you are paying to find out.
How you know it is working
What lands in your report
- Rankings and traffic reported per language, never averaged into one number.
- Enquiries by language, so you can see which side of the market is actually converting rather than just visiting.
- hreflang validated, with any broken or one-way tags listed rather than assumed correct.
- Reviews and profile activity in both, because the profile is where a lot of the Spanish-language contact starts.
I run this business in Spanish and English every day, and the Spanish here is written by a native speaker rather than produced by a tool and checked afterwards. What I will not do is publish machine-translated pages to make a site look bilingual. They read as foreign to the people you want, and they are the fastest way to make a business look like it is not really from here.
Fit
Whether this is the right one
This is the right service when
- A meaningful share of your customers search, call or read in Spanish.
- Your competitors are all fighting over the English terms and ignoring the other half.
- You already have a site in one language and want the second done properly.
It is the wrong one when
- Your customers genuinely only operate in one language.
- You want the existing site machine-translated and published as-is.
- Nobody in the business can answer the phone in Spanish when it rings.
If your problem is somewhere else
- Google MapsWhen the problem is the map pack: you are not in the three, or only in your own block.
- Local SEOWhen you own the map but the normal results below it belong to someone else.
- AI searchWhen the answer engines describe your category without ever naming you.
- Web designWhen the traffic already arrives and the page it lands on is what loses it.
- Google & Meta AdsWhen you need the phone to ring this month, not in the sixth one.
Questions
Bilingual SEO, answered straight
Should I translate my website or build the Spanish version separately?
Build it separately. Translation preserves your sentences and loses the searches, because the literal Spanish version of a service is often not the phrase anyone types. The Spanish side needs its own keyword research, and it frequently turns out to have different priorities, different competitors and much less competition than the English side.
What is hreflang and why does it break bilingual sites?
It is the tag that tells Google two pages are the same content in different languages, so it can show the right one to the right person instead of treating them as duplicates. It breaks in two ways, both extremely common: the tag points at a URL that does not exist, or it is declared in one direction only. Either way Google discards the relationship and your two versions start competing with each other.
Do you write in Spanish from Spain or Latin American Spanish?
Miami Spanish, which in practice means Latin American with Caribbean vocabulary and without the constructions that mark a text as European. It matters more than people expect: the words for parts, trades and processes differ, and using the Spain version reads as foreign to the customer you are trying to win.
Will having two languages split my rankings?
Not if the technical side is correct. With reciprocal hreflang, clean canonicals and sensible internal linking, the two versions reinforce each other. Done badly, they do split, and that is the single most common reason a bilingual site underperforms a monolingual competitor with less content.
Is Spanish included in the price or is it extra?
Included. Both languages are part of the Visibility plan at $1,290 a month. Charging for the second language separately would be strange in a market where the second language is half the market.
Next
Find out where you actually stand
A free audit: what you rank for today, in both languages, what is blocking it and what I would do first. No obligation and no sales call unless you ask for one.
Krelo works with businesses across Miami-Dade and Broward County, in English and Spanish. See what the work has produced →