Your website is in English, and that makes sense. Your best-paying clients are in the United States, you have been sending proposals in English for years, and your sales team works that way. Meanwhile, the company that needs a development team in Madrid or Guadalajara this week types its search in Spanish, and your site is nowhere to be found.
Running your website in one language picks a market for you
Nobody sits down and decides to give up the Spanish-speaking market. It just happens. You start out selling abroad, the site is born in English because that is the client you are after, and a few years later your entire digital presence points at one market while your operation, your team, and your reputation live in another. You end up well known in your own city and invisible in your own language.
Choosing the language of your website is choosing who gets to find you.
In English you compete against the whole world, in Spanish against a handful
Of the more than twenty million sites W3Techs tracks, almost half publish in English and only 6% in Spanish. That gap is not a piece of trivia, it is the size of the line you stepped into. In English you are up against development studios in Eastern Europe, consultancies in India, and anyone with a content budget; in Spanish, against the handful of companies in your country that bothered to say clearly what they build.
The same effort pays off differently depending on where you put it.
The English-speaking market keeps growing and it rewards precision
To be fair to English, the demand is real and it is not shrinking. In Deloitte’s Global Outsourcing Survey, based on more than 500 executives, 80% said they will maintain or increase their investment in third-party providers. That market is worth having and there is no reason to give it up. What changes is how you win it, because you will not get in through the most searched term but through what makes you different, your vertical, your stack, the kind of project you solve best, and the time-zone advantage a consultancy on the other side of the world cannot offer.
Both languages add up, and each one needs its own strategy.
We measured 1,357 companies in Spanish and most of them do not show up
In the two visibility indexes we published, one in Mexico and one in Spain, we measured 1,357 companies in the sector using searches and questions written in Spanish, exactly as a local buyer would. In Mexico, 509 out of 626 did not show up in Google or ChatGPT. In Spain it was 572 out of 731. Eight out of ten companies are absent from the place where their Spanish-speaking client starts looking, and many of them have flawless, fast, well-designed sites, in English.
The Spanish version is not a translation, it is written for a different buyer
Translating the site word for word leaves the problem untouched, because a Spanish-speaking buyer does not search for the same thing as an American one and does not call it the same either. One looks for nearshore software development, the other types Spanish terms like fábrica de software, desarrollo a medida, or equipo de desarrollo externo. The terms change, the references change, and even what they need to see before trusting you changes. A Spanish version that mirrors the English structure usually ends up correct and lifeless, without a single one of the words people actually type.
When the question is asked in Spanish, the answer is built from Spanish sources
This holds for AI models too. When someone asks in Spanish about development companies in their country, the model tends to lean on Spanish-language material to put the answer together, and if everything your company says only exists in English, you have a lower chance of making that list. It is not a fixed rule and there is no guaranteed formula, it is a signal that moves the odds in your favor, same as a site that is easy to read and a message that says plainly what you build. If you want to sort this out properly, that is what our SEO for software development companies is about.
The market closest to you is the one you worked the least
Go back for a second to your English site. It is well built, it describes real projects, and it got you this far. The only thing missing is half the map, the half right next to you, where people know you by name and the competition has not arrived yet. Opening that half is not starting from scratch, it is saying in Spanish what you already know how to say in English.
