International SEO tips and tricks

Hello everyone,

I run an e-commerce site based in the US, and I want to expand my market to a few South American countries.

What's the best way to rank in Spanish? Should I add a subdomain for each language or country, or should I create separate sites with country-specific domains like '.mx' for Mexico and '.pe' for Peru? My idea is to have a Spanish page with relevant information and a link to my main site's shopping page. Then, users can use a widget on my main site to switch to Spanish text.

Are there any better techniques, possibly blackhat methods, to achieve visibility in these foreign countries?

Thank you for any help you can provide!

Get a Spanish writer either to translate or rewrite
A separate domain is important
Analyze the SERPs of those country

GoSocial said:

Get a Spanish writer either to translate or rewrite
A separate domain is important
Analyze the SERPs of those country

Click to expand...

Separate domain. Got it. I had a feeling it needed to be done this way. Thanks for your help.

GoSocial said:

Get a Spanish writer either to translate or rewrite
A separate domain is important
Analyze the SERPs of those country

Click to expand...

hiddenhand said:

Separate domain. Got it. I had a feeling it needed to be done this way. Thanks for your help.

Click to expand...

You can go with subfolders, subdomains or ccTLDs, all of them works fine,
separate domains are not required,

All depends on the competition,
If the spanish keywords in these countries are not as competitive,
use a subfolder and you'll rank for most without any additional links/authority needed,

use WPML, it makes everything easy to setup,
all including the proper hreflangs, language switcher(s), translation managements, etc...

Multi language plugin is ideal for you as its is an ecommerce website,
As hideath told that use WPML for the wordpress based website or translate plugins for the other CMS.

I would recommend a separate domain for it, and hire native writers to translate all the contents and do proper on page optimization of the website. This will help you start getting results from the location you want traffic from.

Separate domain will rank better.

I would suggest using a seperate domain if you would like to use a multi language plugin.

The better choice is to use country specific domains with local contents including related keywords