What to look for in an SEO partner when your team works in English and your market is Spain: the four models, what each costs you, and how to test capability.
If your team works in English and your market is Spain, you are choosing between four models rather than a list of agencies. Get the model right and the shortlist is short. Get it wrong and you will spend a year translating instructions.
This comes up constantly with brands entering Spain, and it is rarely framed correctly. The question people ask is which agency is best in Barcelona or Madrid. The question that decides the outcome is who does the Spanish-language thinking, and how far that person sits from the people who set your strategy.
The four models, and what each one costs you
A local Spanish agency
Deep native language capability and real market knowledge. The trade-off is the working relationship. If your marketing lead does not speak Spanish, every strategic conversation runs through translation, either literally or through whoever on their team has the best English. Nuance gets lost in both directions, and the things that need arguing about, priorities and trade-offs, are exactly the things that survive translation worst.
Right when Spain is a major market with its own budget and someone in your business owns it in Spanish.
A UK or international agency with no Spanish capability
Easy to work with and structurally unable to do the part that matters. Keyword research done by translating English terms produces plans built on phrases nobody searches. Copy that reads as translated undermines the brand with exactly the buyers you are trying to win. We see the results of this often enough to recognise it on sight.
Right almost never, unless Spain is genuinely a secondary English-language audience such as expatriates or international B2B buyers.
A freelance Spanish specialist alongside your existing agency
Cheaper than either of the above and workable when the volume is low. The risk is coordination. The freelancer executes, your agency sets strategy, and nobody owns the gap between them. It works when someone in your business is genuinely running the programme rather than hoping the two suppliers will sort it out.
An English-speaking team with native Spanish capability on the ground
Strategy in the language your business runs in, execution in the language your market searches in. This is the model we run from Barcelona, so treat the recommendation with the appropriate suspicion. What is worth taking regardless of who you hire is the underlying test: can the same organisation argue with you in English and write for a Spanish buyer without a handoff in between?
What to test, whoever you shortlist
Ask for the keyword research in Spanish, natively
The single most revealing request. Give a prospective partner a product or service and ask what Spanish buyers actually search for. A weak answer is a translated list of your English terms. A strong answer names terms that do not map cleanly to English at all, explains why one phrasing wins commercially, and flags where Spanish search behaviour diverges from what you are used to. Ask which database they pulled from and when.
Ask who writes, and who edits
Machine translation followed by a native edit is now a legitimate workflow, and anyone claiming they never touch it is either behind or not being straight with you. What matters is the order and the ownership. Research natively, draft however you like, edit natively, and have one named person accountable for whether the Spanish reads like a Spanish company wrote it.
Ask how they will structure the site
The structural decision, subdirectory against subdomain against a .es domain, is far harder to reverse than any tag and it should come up unprompted in the first serious conversation. If a prospective partner talks about hreflang before they have asked whether your pricing, stock or legal terms differ by market, they are answering the wrong question. Our guide to multilingual SEO for Spain sets out how we work through it.
Ask what they will not do
A partner worth having will tell you where Spain is not the priority. If your English site is underbuilt, fixing that usually returns more than launching a second language on top of a weak foundation. An agency that agrees with everything you propose is selling, not advising.
Catalonia, and when it matters
If Barcelona specifically is your base or your market, ask directly about Catalan. The useful answer is not enthusiasm. It is a view on whether Catalan earns its place for your business, given that a large share of Catalan speakers search in Spanish for commercial and technical terms. Building a Catalan version because it feels respectful, without demand behind it, gives you a third thin variant to maintain and a cannibalisation risk you did not have before.
The right time for Catalan is when you have a physical presence, a local partner, or a brand position in Catalonia that a Spanish-only site would undersell.
Questions we get asked
Do I need an agency physically in Spain?
For the search work itself, no. Rankings do not care where your agency sits. What a presence in the market buys you is context: what buyers ask about, which competitors actually matter, and how the local media and partner landscape works. That context is worth real money on a market-entry programme and much less once you are established.
Is it cheaper to hire in Spain than in the UK?
Often, at the same seniority level. But the comparison people actually make is between a senior UK team and a junior Spanish one, which is not a like-for-like saving. Compare on who does the work rather than on where they sit.
How do I judge Spanish copy if I do not speak Spanish?
Three proxies work reasonably well. Ask a native-speaking customer or colleague to read it cold and tell you whether it sounds like a Spanish company. Check whether the copy uses terms your Spanish competitors use, which you can compare without fluency. And watch engagement on the Spanish pages against the English ones. Translated copy tends to look fine and perform badly, which is exactly why it survives so long.
Should the Spanish site be a copy of the English one?
Start close, then diverge where the market gives you a reason to. A mirrored structure is easier to launch and easier to measure. What should not be mirrored is the content itself, because the search demand underneath each page is different.
How long before a Spanish launch shows results?
Longer than a new section on an established domain and shorter than a new site, if you launch on a subdirectory. The variable that matters most is whether you are competing in Spanish against Spanish incumbents or in English against a thin field. The second is much faster, which is why the English-language niche is usually the right first move.
Where we fit
We work with English-speaking companies selling into Spain, with a specialist on the ground in Barcelona and the UK team behind it. That means the strategy conversation happens in English and the Spanish work is done natively rather than translated. Our Barcelona market page sets out how the engagements run, and the market entry playbook for Spain covers the wider launch sequence.
If you are weighing partners, the general version of these criteria is in how to choose an SEO agency. And if you would like a second opinion on a proposal you have already received, get in touch.