If you run a bar in Quesada or a plumbing business in Torrevieja and 90% of your customers are British, an English-only website feels like the obvious choice. Sometimes it is. But the reasoning that gets you there is usually wrong.
The mistake: judging by who calls you today
Your current customers are British because your website is in English. That is circular. The Spanish customers who searched for what you do never found you, so they never called, so they do not appear in your numbers. You cannot measure the market you are invisible to.
What you actually lose with English only
- Every Spanish search for your service in your town. Even in the most British parts of the coast, that is a real share of the market.
- Spanish tradespeople and businesses who might refer work to you.
- Some credibility. A business trading in Spain with nothing in Spanish reads as temporary to a Spanish customer.
- Google's understanding of where you operate. A site with no Spanish and no Spanish address is harder to place locally.
When English-only genuinely is fine
- Your service only makes sense for non-Spanish speakers: relocation help, NIE paperwork for foreigners, English-speaking legal advice.
- You are in a very concentrated area — parts of Orihuela Costa, Camposol — where the local market really is overwhelmingly British.
- You are already at capacity and not looking for more work.
- It is a holiday rental aimed at the UK market and bookings come through the portals.
If you are in the first group, do not add Spanish for the sake of it. Two half-maintained languages is worse than one good one, and every page you add is a page that has to stay accurate.
The middle option most people miss
You do not have to choose between one language and a full mirror. A single well-written Spanish page covering who you are, what you do, your area and how to contact you captures the Spanish searches without doubling your maintenance. It is a couple of hundred euros of work rather than a second website.
If you do it, do it properly
- Separate URLs per language: yoursite.com/en/service and yoursite.com/es/servicio. Without that, Google only has one page to index.
- hreflang tags linking each version to its counterpart, in both directions.
- Each version canonicals to itself. Pointing the Spanish page at the English one tells Google it is a copy and it will never be shown.
- Written, not machine-translated. A Spaniard searching for a plumber types "fontanero", not the literal translation of your English heading.
- A visible language switcher at the top, not a flag icon buried in the footer.