SEO for the Spanish market by the person who does the work, not the fifth name on a “best agencies in Spain” list.
I’m David Carrasco, an SEO consultant based in Barcelona. If you’re a company entering or growing in the Spanish market, you’ve already met the listicles: the ten best agencies, the fourteen best, ranked by people who’ve never seen your business. This page is the alternative to them.
Search for SEO companies in Spain and you get directories. Ranked lists, review counts, logos. What none of them tell you is the thing that actually decides the outcome for a company entering a foreign market: not the size of the agency, but who personally touches your account. On most of those lists you won’t meet that person until after the contract is signed.
I’m one consultant, in Barcelona. The person who diagnoses your situation is the person who does the work, and the person who answers your email. You’re already carrying the uncertainty of a market you don’t know well. Whoever works on it shouldn’t add to that uncertainty.
Not because they’re bad at SEO. Plenty are very good. They underperform here for a duller reason: nobody on the team actually searches in Spanish, lives the culture, or feels it when a phrase lands wrong.
The keyword research gets done off a translated seed list, so the page targets the words a dictionary would pick, not the words a customer in Valencia types. The content gets reviewed by an account manager who can confirm it’s grammatical and can’t tell you it reads like a brochure from 2009. The international playbook that worked in Germany gets applied to Spain with the labels swapped, as if search behaviour travelled with the template.
And then the part that never shows up in a dashboard: knowing why a Spanish buyer trusts one brand over another, what a normal price looks like here, which reassurances they need before they fill in a form. That isn’t a ranking factor you can pull from a tool. It’s market knowledge, and it’s the thing a global network structurally can’t hold for twenty markets at once.
A recent example. An international mobility manufacturer brought us in, white-label through a European agency, to run SEO across five European markets at once, Spain among them. The instinct was a single European playbook, translated language by language. The audit killed that instinct fast: in the worst market more than half of the users were landing on the wrong country’s domain, and over a third of the top pages weren’t commercial or weren’t even the right country. We fixed the routing first, then built each market around the specific fears a local buyer actually searches, Spain included, instead of translating one message five times. The main commercial metric ended up beating its target by more than 50%.
One market with its own search behaviour
Rank higher for keywords aligned with company objectives, overtake your competitors and absorb the most interested and relevant audience.
Because you want more traffic, yes, but only the traffic that is most likely to be your customer. And not someone else’s. That selection starts with how keyword research actually works now.
hreflang, architecture and localization done right
The visitor must work from the first contact with your services to the purchase and then retention, repeat business and advocacy.
With SEO you attract more and a higher quality of traffic, keep them engaged and guide them through the buying journey with commercial keywords. Additionally, you can identify and leverage new business opportunities and expand your traffic sources. Which paths to open first, you decide with your own first-party data, not a hunch.
When buyers ask ChatGPT in Spanish, do you exist?
Entering Spain is not a one-off setup. The market, the competitors and how people search here keep moving, and so does what Spanish-language AI says about you. I keep the strategy adjusting to that, not frozen at launch.
I’ve watched enough expansions into Spain to know they fail in the same handful of ways. None of them are about not doing enough SEO.
Translating instead of localizing. A word-for-word translation reads fine to a translator and wrong to a buyer. People in Spain don’t search the way your home market does, and they don’t trust a page that sounds translated. The keywords, the examples, the tone: all of it moves. For B2B that shift starts with B2B keyword research done for this market, not carried over from yours.
Treating Spain and LATAM as one market. Publish in Spanish without proper hreflang and market signals and you’ll pull traffic from Mexico, Colombia and Argentina that will never walk into your Spanish business. It looks like growth in the dashboard. It converts like noise.
Trust signals that don’t travel. What builds trust in the US or the UK isn’t what builds it here. In Spain a visible legal page, transparent pricing with VAT, real reviews and a local presence do more than a slick landing. Skip them and the page ranks but doesn’t convert.
Expecting your usual competitors. Google in Spain rewards local specialists you’ve never heard of. You’re not competing against the global brand in your category. You’re competing against the person who has owned “your service + city” for eight years.
Forgetting the checkout. For ecommerce: local payment methods, shipping expectations and returns in Spanish. The SEO can be perfect and the sale still dies at a checkout that feels foreign.
The fix isn’t more content. It’s someone who has done this from inside the market deciding what actually needs to change, and in what order.
and for a foreign company entering Spain, that direct line matters more than headcount.
If you need senior ownership of all this without a full-time hire, that’s a fractional SEO seat, and it’s how most companies entering Spain start.
Templates. Checklists. Packs. They’re tools that keep an agency warm by shepherding clients through an assembly line. It’s the marketing equivalent of a bland ham-and-cheese sandwich, convenient, tasteless, and short-sighted, doing SEO like punching a time clock.
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Is Spain the right move, with what offer, and where to focus. Half the job is this call, before touching a single tag.
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Technical setup, content written for how Spanish buyers search, and local authority. Five priorities, not a translated checklist.
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So that when a buyer asks ChatGPT in Spanish about your sector, you exist and you're described right. I review, measure and adjust.
I work with companies serious about the Spanish market, not with those who want to “be in Spain” without deciding whether Spain is worth it for them. Expanding multiplies what you already have, problems included. If the offer doesn’t land at home, translating it into Spanish only spreads the miss.
I’m not for anyone after a plugin translation and a quick win. Doing this right takes real localization, a market decision made on purpose, and patience.
And I’m not the cheapest line on the list. A foreign-market project carries more analysis and more that can break than a domestic one. If price is the only filter, a directory will serve you better than I will.
If that didn’t put you off, start the conversation below.
Are you an agency?
No. I’m an independent consultant in Barcelona. You work directly with me, not with an account manager who hands your project to someone you never meet. For a company entering Spain, that direct line usually matters more than headcount.
Do you work with companies based outside Spain?
Yes. Foreign companies entering the Spanish market, or brands already here that aren’t getting the visibility they should, are most of what I do. We work in English, and the strategy is built for Spain rather than borrowed from your home market.
Is “SEO for Spain” the same as “SEO in Spanish”?
No, and getting it wrong at the start wastes budget. SEO for Spain targets one country, with its own search behaviour, currency and competitors. SEO in Spanish can mean the whole Spanish-speaking world, which is many different markets with different intent. If you target Spain and Latin America with one generic Spanish page, it ranks for no one in particular. Decide your priority market first, then the architecture.
How are you different from the “best SEO agency in Spain” lists?
Those lists rank by size and review count. I’m not competing on either. The difference is that the person framing the strategy is the person doing the work, and the brand and AI side that most still treat as an afterthought is part of the engagement, not something I’ll upsell you later.
What does it cost?
More than the cheapest agency, less than a global network. A foreign-market project involves more analysis than a domestic one, so price follows scope. The figure that matters is what business decisions the work lets you make, not the monthly number on its own.
How do we start?
With a conversation about your business and your goals in Spain, before any proposal. If Spain isn’t the right move yet, I’ll say so.
Only someone who has led a company can truly understand what is needed from the marketing and sales team. I have seen it many times and lived how frustrating it is to be operating without taking the time to implement spound, well-thought-out strategies.
Let’s ask the right questions, correct any mistakes, and grow your numbers with tailor-made strategic SEO. With no preconceived ideas, and a healthy dose of skepticism.
Companies with large product development projects and digital solutions need an even broader and deeper vision.
A vision of SEO that supports product optimisation and promotion, in collaboration with business, development and marketing teams.
