How British and American spelling affects the SEO of Australian companies
Do Australians spell more like Brits or Yanks? And why does this matter to your SEO? In this guest post, Matthew Bakmaz explains how to better target your customers through spelling.
In one of his career’s most memorable moments, Arnold Schwarzenegger assuaged the fears of a room full of medically astute kindergarten students concerned about his headache by telling them “It’s not a tumor”.
While this may have been true for detective John Kimble, it appears that it is not the case for Australians today.
Using Hitwise data, we have found that Australians are more likely to use the term ‘tumor’ than they are to use the term ‘tumour’ in their search behaviour.
This has some key implications for SEM strategy and the emphasis placed on certain keywords.
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We English speakers place too much emfasis on spelling. We talk about it, we argue about it, we judge people by it, we waste time on it. Why? Because our spelling is dysfunctional and open to argument and judgment.
It is but a tool for written communication. It was not handed down from the mountain top on slabs of stone. It was devised by humans to make literacy learning as easy as possible, so all could participate.
English spelling does not do this at all well. It has far too many exceptions to the norms. It is time that it was upgraded to match the perfection of such systems as Finnish or Korean, so that it would arouse as much passion as any other tool.
Where we currently hav (sic) a choice, we should choose the better, mor logical option.
I wish that all Anglophone countries would co-operate on setting up an organisation for the sake of making English spelling more sensible in all of them. Their 20% rate of functional illiteracy is equally high in all of them.
Few of the US changes introduced two centuries ago have done so. They were adopted in the spirit of independence to make US spelling slightly DIFFERENT from the British variety, not to make learning to read and write easier.
People who can’t spell do not deserve to have the Internet.
On the other hand, Search Engines have been taught to differentiate between correctly spelled words and otherwise.
Personally I’m sick of reading your for you’re, but my kids tell me “there, there, they’re there”.
And plural’s don’t get an apostrophie.
I’ve pretty much given up on ‘skedule’ and ‘lootenant’ and ‘proh-cess’.
Dayta is a done deal. Nobody seems to say ‘data’ anymore.
Tomato, tomato.
Sorry Matthew. The “incorrect” spellings of color, flavor and neighbor are not incorrect for someone who grew up in the public school system in Victoria in the 60s and 70s. That was what we were taught on our spelling lists.
To prove the point, I suggest you look back at old newspapers from Melbourne from the 1920s to around the 1990s. Same with those in Adelaide. You’ll see color, flavor and neighbor all there. It was only because the NSW headquartered media outlets ordered that the UK spelling be adopted nationwide sometime in the 90s. I remember an interview with someone from the Herald Sun bemoaning the decision.
Bek raises an interesting point and something I wasn’t aware of. It would be good to see how spelling varies across age brackets in Australia as this could help SEO (and PPC) experts determine what word variations to target in their efforts. For example, a business that deals mainly with baby boomers may find it more beneficial to promote the US spelling of certain words (to some extent) if that’s what their audience is using in their search queries (eg. color and flavor as per Bek’s comment). Another variation I’ve noticed is jewellery / jewelry – according to AdWords Keyword Planner there are 33,100 average searches per month in Australia for “jewellery”, compared to “jewelry” which has 14,800 (nearly half!) per month. The suggested PPC bid is 16cents higher for the US spelling also. Based on this, it would make sense to target both variations in PPC advertising, and the UK “jewellery” version for SEO. Some great insights learned from this article, thanks!