American Spellings On Google

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February 16th, 2010 by Dan Taylor

If you are looking for keywords that use UK English spellings such as ‘search engine optimisation’ or ‘personalised mugs’ you are likely to be accessing Google in its UK incarnation, www.google.co.uk. However, irritatingly, Google will often choose to show all the American results for that spelling. It is true that Google is an American company and there is likely to be a bias towards the American use of ‘z’ rather than the English use of ‘s’, but it can nevertheless be a somewhat frustrating experience.

The results will suggest that UK searchers have in fact spelt the word incorrectly which could be taken as being quite insulting. To make Google searches friendlier to the UK searcher, Google should start listing the terms that have been searched for and then list alternative spellings. As a UK business it would be important to target the correct UK spelling such as ‘optimise’. Without this clarity, Google are almost suggesting that a searcher does not understand what they are looking for.

This even applies when you select the ‘pages from the UK’ option. Here American spellings are also listed as alternatives to the UK spelling. This may not seem a major issue to many people who are not overly concerned, but hopefully in the future this issue can be addressed so that UK businesses can set up SEO aiming just at UK spellings rather than having to consider American spellings also.

At Click Consult we can advise on all facets of search engine optimisation to ensure your web marketing campaign gets you the best results.

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