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.
While it would remain sensible for an Australian health information site to continue to use the spelling ‘tumour’ in its official content, there are potential opportunities around PPC, use of keywords in meta tags, links to American sites or sharing of American content.
This prompted us to look at some more common words that have British vs American spellings.
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Overall, it is comforting to see that Australians are using the British spelling more often but for particular keywords the gap between the two variations is smaller than expected.
The incorrect versions of the keywords ‘Color’, ‘Flavor’ and ‘Neighbor’ are used about one third of the time, highlighting the need to be aware of these variations if they are related to the usual search terms you are targeting.
The higher share of ‘humor’ and ‘apologize’ appear to be more related to brands and pop culture rather than everyday usage, with searches for ‘College Humor’ and ‘Too Late to Apologize lyrics’ being the dominant variations.
‘License’ is also a highly used term that does have a legitimate use in British English; however, looking at its top variations, it appears to be related to the incorrect usage (E.g. ‘Fishing License’, ‘Forklift License’, ‘Divers License’).
Many brands are already well aware of the importance of targeting misspelled keywords. Although it is relatively common for all variations of branded terms to be targeted, it is also vital to be targeting generic keywords that are misspelled.
For example, the keyword ‘accommodation’ is the largest search driver to the Destinations and Accommodation industry (more important than ‘hotel/hotels’).
It drives 10 times as much traffic as ‘accomodation’, 971 times as much as ‘acommodation’ and 3,825 times as much as ‘acomodation’.
What we can also see from these search variations is that even though ‘accommodation’ is already a highly competitive term from a PPC perspective (Paid Rate of 83%), the incorrect variations have even higher Paid Rates, indicating that Paid Search is the preferred method of driving traffic from these terms.
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Using the Audience View platform, we can isolate the audiences who have used the British spelling of words vs the American spelling of words.
Understanding the types of people that are using different spellings of words can be valuable in the subtle variations that can be used in the ad text and landing pages.
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Compared with the audience of UK spellers, the US spellers were 1.35 times more likely to be aged 18-24 and 1.18x more likely to be male.
They were also more likely to be in the MOSAIC audiences associated with young professionals and students (Groups C and I). The fact that younger audiences are more likely to use the American spellings of words can be a useful tool for configuring your PPC campaigns.
For example, if Flight Centre saw that younger male audiences were more likely to search ‘Flight Center’, then the ad text and landing page could be altered to direct them to offers more suited to them.
What could be the reason for younger audiences using American spelling? Is the education system failing? Is US pop culture so pervasive that it has started to blend into Australia’s? Or have a generation of native Microsoft Office suite users finally been ground down and given up on changing the auto-corrections made every time they type ‘organise’ in a Word document or email?
Using Audience View to see what sites US Spellers are more likely to visit than UK Spellers, some interesting trends emerge.
Firstly, US Spellers are less likely to be getting their news from Australian websites than UK Spellers, with News.com.au (0.79 times as likely), SMH (0.9 times as likely) and ABC (0.74 times as likely) all under-indexed.
This indicates that exposure to news from international sources could be contributing to their preference for American spelling.
The second is that the US Spellers are over-indexed for most social sites except for Facebook.
The US Spellers are more likely to be found on YouTube (1.34 times more likely), Reddit (1.42 times more likely), Twitter (1.37 times more likely) and Instagram (1.18 times more likely).
Compared with Facebook, these sites are less likely to be about a user’s personal network and more likely to involve consuming content from around the world, leading to an increased amount of exposure to American spelling.
Finally, the US Spellers are over-indexed for gaming sites such as Twitch (1.71 times more likely), Steam Community (1.86 times more likely) and Game FAQs (1.75 times more likely).
The rise of online gaming has led to people interacting with other gamers around the world and this is where the US Spellers are also getting exposed to the American spelling of words.
Matthew Bakmaz is an insights analyst at Hitwise
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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