Three months ago I launched How a Car Works in Spanish - succinctly titled Cómo Funciona un Auto. It is the best designed, most accessible and most in-depth Spanish guide to car mechanics available. It’s free, without ads, and heavily optimized for mobile with a Pagespeed score of 95/100, which is exceptional.

And people love it - our Facebook page received 10,000 likes in less than a month. Even better, the Spanish audience is far more engaged with our content than the English. It’s really rewarding to see people sharing and tagging their friends.

But our site traffic comes almost exclusively from Facebook. After three months, Google sends us nothing, and we don’t rank on the first page even for the name of our own site.

I’m used to Google taking a long time to build up steam but this is absurd. We receive literally 20 visitors from Google results each day.

It’s bad for us, and it’s bad for people looking for information on cars. The number one result for “Cómo funciona un auto” for example, is a short blog post embedding a widely circulated infographic - IN ENGLISH.

It took approximately three years for completely unchanged content on How a Car Works to move up the rankings to our current strong position. How can it take three years to decide if content is original and high quality, or just badly written waffle plastered with adverts?

It’s incredibly frustrating. I know that our content is great. For the English site, Guy Kawasaki just tweeted it out, it front paged on Reddit last week. I’ve invested a fairly significant sum in having the content translated to Spanish and building our the backend to enable us to translate the 2,000+ illustrations. But this investment is going to be super slow to payback without any Google traffic.