#Check your dealership's Spanish content in two minutes
Open your website and switch it to Spanish. Right-click the page, choose View Page Source, and search that source for a Spanish word you can see on screen.
On most dealer platforms the only Spanish in the file is the label on the language button. Everything else is English, because the switch happens in the visitor's browser after the page arrives. Google was sent the English page, and the English page is what it kept.
Nobody was lying to you. A translate button is a real feature and it does display your site in Spanish. It just never produced a Spanish page for anyone to find.
#Translating your English pages misses them anyway
Say the translation is done well and Google can read it. There is a second problem underneath, and it survives.
A translated page carries the search targeting of the page it came from. Your English Silverado page was built to answer English searches, so the Spanish version answers the Spanish wording of English searches. Nobody types that.
Most dealers could not say what a Spanish shopper types. Here it is.
TABLE
What a Spanish shopper types, next to what your English page targets
Left: what the English page on your site is built to answer. Right: what a Spanish-speaking buyer in the same town types into Google. Translating the page does not reach them.
| Your English page targets | The Spanish shopper types | What is different |
|---|---|---|
| Silverado work truck | camioneta de trabajo / troca | Regional wording. There is no English phrase to translate from. |
| Bad credit auto financing | financiamiento sin crédito | No credit history, not damaged credit. A different problem. |
| Buy here pay here | compre aquí, pague aquí | A set Spanish phrase, not a word-for-word version. |
| Car buying process | requisitos para comprar un carro | They are asking what is required, not how it works. |
| Contact our sales team | concesionario que habla español | They are asking about language. Your page never mentions it. |
#The manufacturer already owns the model searches
Chevrolet, Toyota and Ford all publish Spanish model sites, so a dealership page competing on the nameplate alone is competing with the factory.
What no manufacturer will ever publish is your store. Which documents your finance office takes, who on your floor speaks Spanish and when they work, what happens to a trade-in with a lien on it. Those searches happen every day in your town and nobody is answering them.
#It is an AI answer problem too
When somebody asks ChatGPT a question about a truck or a dealership in Spanish, it pulls from the same pages Google indexes. In Spanish there is barely anything for it to pull from.
So your page competes against far less in Spanish than it would in English. Same job as our car dealer GEO work, in a language where the field is close to empty.
#What dealership Spanish content includes
Pages on your own website, written in Spanish, that a Spanish speaker can read and act on. Your models. Your financing. Your paperwork. Your store, and the people in it who speak the language.
Worth saying plainly: this works better if somebody at your store speaks Spanish. The pages bring in Spanish-language enquiries, and a store that cannot answer them closes fewer of them.
The service that builds this is on the Spanish SEO and content page, with live client pages you can look at.