The brief
Casa Norte sells paint, flooring, and small renovations content to households searching in Spanish from the United States. The English site was fine. The Spanish URLs were a translation layer with hreflang pointed at Spain for some templates. People in Texas searching “pintura para baño” were not being helped by a Madrid magazine, and they were not being helped by an English DIY blog with one translated paragraph.
The previous profile mixed Spain blogs, Mexican catalogues, and US English publishers. Rank tracking from Spain looked unrelated to the business. Rank tracking from US locations on Spanish queries showed the pages buried under big-box retailers and YouTube.
The brief had to name the audience: Spanish-language search in the United States. Not Spain. Not “LatAm.” Not English DIY with a language toggle.
What we did
Hreflang and canonicals were corrected before outreach. We will not pitch a URL that still tells search systems it is for Spain. That month felt unproductive on a spreadsheet. It is the cheapest work in the engagement.
Publishers were US Hispanic media, bilingual home titles, and a small set of local newsrooms that already cover housing in Spanish. We looked at whether the article assumed US retailers, US measurements, and US regulations. A beautiful Mexican interior blog was adjacent and still the wrong country for this brief.
Pitches offered practical pieces: how bilingual households shop for paint, which labels actually matter, what a contractor quote in Spanish should include. Anchors stayed descriptive. We did not force “comprar pintura online” into every sentence.
Metrics were recorded. They did not rescue a host whose archive was English with a plugin translation. Those were declined even when DR looked comforting.
Sessions across the engagement
Mar–Jul 2025. Organic is the destination URLs in this brief; referrals are clicks from accepted placements.
Organic sessions Referral sessions
What actually went live
Accepted URLs only. Declined prospects are not dressed up as a pipeline.
- Reported mentions13
- Contributed articles10
- Expert quotes6
What moved
Spanish organic sessions on the US landing pages rose 41 percent. The mix of hosts that actually helped was mostly bilingual US media, not European Spanish titles. Zero Spain placements were used. That restraint is visible in the referring-domain chart.
Rankings on a handful of commercial-informational hybrids improved. Big-box retailers still occupy the obvious product queries. The work was never going to knock those over in five months. It was going to make Casa Norte look like a source those results pages already understand.
The in-house team now separates US Spanish reporting from Spain reporting. That sounds obvious. It is the mistake most international programmes still make.
US Spanish queries are messy on purpose. Some searchers mix English product names with Spanish modifiers. Some want a big-box retailer. Some want a how-to. We did not try to win the queries that are already a retailer carousel. We took the hybrids — paint in a bathroom, reading a contractor quote, vinyl flooring explained in Spanish — where a brand page can still be a source. That is a narrower win. It is also a win you can keep.
Measurement stayed attached to the es-US templates. A combined “all Spanish” view in Analytics was turned off for this engagement because it mixed Spain traffic into the story. If a session came from Madrid, it was interesting and not the brief. The monthly chart in this write-up is the US Spanish landing pages only. Anything else would have been a prettier lie.
Selected queries
Positions from the market named in the brief. A dash means the URL was not ranking in the top 100 at the start.
| Query | Before | After | Move |
|---|---|---|---|
| pintura para baño | #19 | #8 | +11 |
| pisos vinilo en español | #26 | #11 | +15 |
| cómo leer presupuesto remodelación | #14 | #6 | +8 |
| pintura interior húmeda | #33 | #13 | +20 |
What we declined
- Spain interior magazines.
- English DIY blogs with a translated block.
- Mexican hosts used as a language proxy.
A second phase will add two city-level guides. Same audience. Same refusal to flatten the market into a language code.
US Spanish will keep mixing English product names into Spanish queries. The campaign does not need to purify that. It needs to cite pages that already live in that mix: bilingual desks, US retailers in the examples, measurements a hardware aisle actually uses. Anything else is a Spain campaign wearing a different hreflang tag.
The ranking table is those hybrid queries only. Retailer head terms were tracked and left out of the win column, so a supermarket carousel could not be mistaken for a campaign result.
Written 22 July 2025. Figures are from the campaign reporting for Casa Norte.