Many healthcare companies recognize the US Hispanic market as a growing part of their business and online strategy, and their websites are slowly beginning to reflect this. Although this is considered a major step toward successful marketing to the US Hispanic audience, providing a Spanish sub-section of a website or dedicating a few pages of content to this population may not be enough to translate into impressive results.
How US Hispanics Use Search Engines
There were 14.2 million US Hispanic internet users in 2005. This number is close to half of the entire Hispanic population in the US. Another statistic to note is that half of these internet users have a household income of at least $50,000 and only 6% of this group, lack a high school education, according to a recent study by Media Audit.
In addition, US Hispanics search habits differ widely as compared to the average search engine user in the US. Google’s search engine, which is the dominant search engine in the US, is not the search engine of preference to the US Hispanic market. According to a comScore Media Metrix study on all US Hispanic internet users in 2005, the four most frequented web properties visited by US Hispanics were search engines, with Google finishing fourth in the study.
Yahoo! and AOL have taken major strides in marketing “Yahoo! en Espa�ol” and “AOL Latino” to build this market share. This is a great example of how marketing and building an interface specifically for the US Hispanic audience can build loyalty and a more comfortable web experience for a Spanish-speaking person in the US. This approach has translated into AOL having the highest reach percentage of all search engines at 74.6%, followed by Yahoo! (74.0%), MSN (68.3%) and Google (49.5%), according to the comScore study.
Translating English into Search Engine Success
The direct translation of an existing healthcare website and its content into Spanish is unfortunately not the only step to gaining search engine results, and it is often the most common mistake. This becomes apparent when the translation of high volume keyphrases from English to Spanish fails to deliver the same performance. For example, a diagnosed US English speaking person searching for more information on a condition’s treatment will often type “condition treatment” (e.g. genital herpes treatment) into a search engine.� A direct translation of this keyphrase into another language may be written in a way that is not often used by people when searching the Web such as “tratamiento de herpes en los genitales” which contains too many words to be searched often, and this lack of keyword research is only recognized later due to poor results.
“Tratamiento” for Improving Search Engine Results
Developing a search engine marketing campaign for a healthcare website that targets the US Hispanic population will result in an improvement in brand recognition and loyalty.� A well-informed search engine campaign will also make it clear that the simple addition of a few webpages in Spanish without a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy can no longer be treated as a complete solution. We need to focus on the best variations of symptoms (”s�ntomas”) and treatment (”tratamiento”) related keywords that are proven to gain results.� We must also deliver web pages which speak directly to the US Hispanic culture, language and habits.
Taking this strategic approach with healthcare websites will inevitably prove to be successful in gaining the dominant market reach with US Hispanics that AOL and Yahoo! are experiencing today.� Failing in this market, would be to ignore millions of potential consumers that are seeking healthcare information in the US.
