The Spanish Search landscape has been featured in numerous occasions in Spanish search marketing blogs but there is not an equivalent in English. This post wants to shed some light on the current situation of the Spanish internet market and its peculiarities and significant growth.
Spanish Internet users search to learn more about product and services (80 %). Internet penetration in Spain has grown to the 52%, overtaking countries such as Latvia, Lithuania. Slovakia or Czech Republic, in order to reach the 17th position in Europe according to Fundación Orange. The annual report that displays data from 2007 also highlight that, although ecommerce is growing in Spain, is still far behind from the European average of 23% of the population purchasing goods online. The report sets the Spanish figure on 13% in 2007.
- Main Spanish Search Engines. Google is the number one property in search. There is not updated official data coming from the AIMC about Search Engines Share Market but the Foundation Orange seems to give a prominent first position to Google.es (95 to 97%), followed by MSN that grew to reach the second position with a meagre 3% and Yahoo plummeting with marginal percentages.
- Website analytics in Spain. Google analytics is the tool more utilized, with a staggering share market of 75%. 50% of all companies don’t use any web analytics tool, they don’t have anyone dedicated to Web Analytics and only the few companies that use a paid analytics tool hire anyone to manage it.Source: SegundaEncuesta del Estado de la Analitica Web en España.
- Biggest sites for social media in Spain (social networking, social bookmarking, news sites, etc) Youtube seems to be the social media site most visited by the Spaniards with 40% of the Internet population using it on a regular basis. However, Spanish users don´t generate as much content as other European users, with a little 7% of the content present in Youtube. That opens a window of opportunity to clever marketers to get much more visibility with viral video campaigns given the lack of competition. Having said that Spain is ahead of de Germany, France and Italy in terms of video generation and consumption. Podcast download, participation in Social networks such as Facebook, Myspace, Neurona, Linkedin or Tuenti, or blogs creation, are also activities carried out by Spanish users with a 20% of the total Internet audience, only behind the UK. Myspace seems to have the biggest social network share market with 34% but it is followed closely by facebook, hi.com and sonico.com. Tuenti.com a Spanish specific social media network has got a big buzz lately, despite being around since 2006 and now has more visitors than facebook and possesses a very high level of participation. You can see from Google Trends the popularity of the site in terms of traffic:
Google Trends for Websites: tuenti.com, facebook.com, hi5.com, sonico.com Spanish equivalent of Digg, social news site, is Meneame.net , very popular. - Search algorithmic differences in Spanish for the main Search Engines. Since Google has such a huge share market in Spain I will talk about the algorithmic differences with Google.com and Google.es, but I believe this could be extrapolated to any country specific Google domain.It has been largely debated that TrustRank has less impact in country specific Google versions than in Google.com. That means that newly created sites would have more probabilities to rank well in country specific Googles than in Google.com. Keyword rich domains seem to have a bigger impact on international versions of Google than in Google.com.Obviously, country specific local domains (.es) are prioritized in SERPs from Google country specific version in detriment of .com.Spam filters work much worse in other languages Google versions than in Google. You can get away with more dodgy stuff internationally, not that I would recommend it.I think Google is increasingly investing on mastering the nuances of different languages so its algorithm can serve the best results to a wider international non english speaker audience. However, I think that stemming algorithms, and I also have the experience to prove this, of course, don’t work so well in romanic languages. As a result, I believe that exact phrase match within content might have more weight in country specific Googles than in .com.
Conclusions:
- Internet penetration in Spain is rapidly increasing. A 250% since 2001.
- Ecommerce is still in its infancy in Spain. Factors such as lack of trust or reliance on more traditional channels can be argued although a big increase is likely to occur.
- Social media is the fastest growing sector and the figures are above more internet developed countries like Germany, France or Italy only behind UK.
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