For years, I have managed about 10 websites that sells products . We have custom from all over the world. But there is exception. We seldom have custom and order from South American. Also I view the google analytic reports of my site. There are less or no visitor from south american. Some of my sites rank well in google and yahoo. Are there any webmaster from south american ? I would like to know which search engine was widely used in south american? Or the network in south american is not developped ? So not many people surf on the internet ?
Just something I saw when I've been traveling. In Asia, they search in English if they are looking for something that they know the English word for, which is common because of the amount of transliteration. The same applies for many other regions, but in Latin America, they speak Spanish(and Portuguese). They search in these languages because they know the terms they need in Spanish/Portuguese and they are more comfortable in it. If you are not writing content in the language they use for searching, they won't find you.
In certain countries like Argentina and Mexico (and more) Yahoo is bigger even than Google,....I dont know for how many time this will stay this way....
I'm a Brazilian Webmaster so i think i can help you , i have many sites , some in Portuguese and the others in English. As Tech Gringo said, mostly of south america don't search for english terms here if someone wants to play arcade games, he never search for "Free Online Games" he goes to google and search "Jogos Online Grátis". So i agree with Tech Gringo, differently from non-latin speakers, the latins speakers googles in his own language.
I was thinking about this, if you want to target South America, why not make up some separate pages written in Portuguese and/pr Spanish. Once you have that content up, then see how you are doing at getting the traffic you want.
Thanks for your feedback. thank you, Tech Gringo . I don't know Spanish or Portuguese. It cost much money to hire someone to do it. But there must be a solution, My investigate reveal that a keyword was always search in South American. I am going to target the market.
Pages in Portuguese and Spanish into the same site?...or it would be necessary to build the site translated into these languages?