Is Your Website English Only?

Here is a number most South Florida business owners have never looked up. In Miami-Dade, 66.3% of residents age five and up speak Spanish at home. In Broward it is 28.8%, and in Palm Beach 20.0%.

And about half of those Spanish speakers in Miami-Dade, 49.8%, say they speak English less than very well. Those figures are from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, 2023 one-year estimates, table S1601.

What an English-only site does to those visitors

Nothing dramatic. They just don't call. Someone searching for a dentist, a lawyer or a contractor in Spanish gets Spanish results first, and a page that only speaks English is not one Google shows them. The ones who do land on it have to work to understand what you offer, and the next result is one tap away.

Many of the sites I look at say "Se habla español" in the footer, and then every word above it is English. The sign tells people you can help them; the page doesn't let them find out how.

Translation plugins aren't the fix

A language widget that machine-translates the page on the fly is better than nothing for a reader, but Google doesn't treat it as a Spanish page, and the wording is rarely how people here actually talk. A real Spanish page, written by someone who speaks it, with the tags that tell Google which language is which, is what shows up in Spanish searches.

The smallest fix

You don't need to rebuild your site or translate every page. Start with the homepage: who you are, what you do, where you are and how to reach you, in Spanish, linked from your English site. If Spanish searches start bringing people in, add the pages they ask about next.