Spanish-English Glossary for Digital Marketing

If you do digital marketing in Spanish or many other languages, you quickly realize it’s hard to find good translations for English terms that you use every day.

Just look at the word “marketing” itself. You’ll find it translated into Spanish as:

• mercadotecnia
• mercadeo
• mercadología
• comercialización
• marketing

The first three are all the official hispanophilic translations, though almost nobody uses them except for Wikipedia and the Real Academia Española. The fact is, “marketing” is what people most commonly use in Spanish, especially in compound terms like “marketing digital” or “marketing directo.”

Translating “search engine optimization” is even worse. You find:

• posicionamiento web
• posicionamiento en buscadores
• posicionamiento SEO
• optimización en motores de búsqueda
• optimización para buscadores
• optimización en buscadores
• SEO

Here again, the anglicism “SEO” is probably the most common, with “posicionamiento web” coming next in terms of frequency. I feel like “optimización para buscadores” is actually the most accurate term, given that “posicionamiento” is so ambiguous, meaning also “ranking” and “positioning.”

So for the benefit of the Internet, I’m going to provide a list of the most common terms in digital marketing and how to translate them. Any suggestions? Leave a comment below.