The Latin American and North American Hispanic search markets are the third largest markets on the web. This raises a lot of questions for online marketers, along with an infinite number of opportunities. This kick-off piece will introduce basic search engine strategies that can be used in the hispanic circus. Hopefully after reading this, you’ll be able to start organizing and laying out your Latino SEO strategy.

Find out where your Latino target audience is searching.

It’s very important to identify which search engines your audience is using to find content, and it varies broadly between the different Latino search communities. By doing some simple research you’ll be able to see how search engine, social media and information site popularity varies between Latin American search markets. This will help you come up with a list of sites that you’ll be optimizing for, since this greatly affects the SERPs. Make sure you exploit the right ones for each region.

Identify your Latino audience’s behavior and preferences.

The Latino search market, just like other search markets, is subdivided by different demographic factors; gender, religion, age, region, etc, are some elements that need to be considered when segmenting the hispanic search market and understanding how they search and consume on the internet.

Understanding how these different audiences search, is a key factor to plan an interactive marketing and search engine optimization campaign. With the Latino search market, search preferences are distinctively marked. Although we all speak the same language in Latin America, words and expressions have very different meanings between our countries. Doing research on this and understanding it, will give you an edge when you optimize your Latino search campaign. Which brings us to the next component.

Latino keyword adaptation

Researching the meaning of keywords and keyphrases for your Latino search campaign is very important. Sometimes these can turn out to be offensive if targeted to the wrong Latino search market. Find out if your list of keywords is appropriate for your target audience.

An easy way to do spanish keyword research is visiting Latino search portals. Identify the most popular ones for your Latino search market and run a few searches to test results. This will also guarantee that you’re using data from the right region. However, this is only going to serve merely as a general marker for your campaign. You should of coarse measure through web analytics. Otherwise, you won’t be able to manage its conversion rates.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much keyword data available yet for the Latin American search market. But it’s extremely important to jump ahead and start optimizing for them.

Most of the top search resources and directories available for the U.S. search market are also handy and convenient for the Latino search industry. Their usage varies from one country to another, but in general they all have spanish versions that are used by Latinos. This is also the case for the top social media and social search websites.