I am based in the UK. I want to appeal to a UK and US market. One of my keywords is 'generalised' which gets way more traffic in my keyword phrase when spelt with a z and not an s. What do I do?
-
Hi folks.
I am based in the UK.
I am about to launch a new blog, and I want to appeal to the UK and US markets.
One of my primary keywords is 'generalised', which gets way more traffic (as seen using Moz's keyword tool) in my keyword phrase when spelt with a z and not an s.
What do I do?
Any guidance would be great. I note this has been discussed before, but seemingly without a conclusion.
I would really appreciate any help you can provide.
-
Hi Martin.
Thanks for the reply.
The results are similar in terms of content type, but there are significantly more results when a z is used and not an s.
I am concerned that if I use a z, my UK audience will think of me as illiterate (especially if I am not consistent). I can't maintain American spelling throughout all of my writing.
I guess I have answered my own question: I either use English UK spelling or got all out and use English US completely.
I would expect Google's AI to overlook such a trivial thing, but I am not convinced!
Catch 22, I think.
-
Do you see significantly different results if you search in Google US and Google UK for the same keyword but with different spelling? If yes, try to mix them up, otherwise don't worry about it. I would guess that for a keyword like this the different spelling shouldn't be too hard.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Almost zero traffic outside Finland
Hello, rankings.jpg I am becoming a bit clueless with our business website. Our site is doing really well in Finland and with Finnish language. Even though our business is fairly new, we have been able to pass many of our competitors in the search only after about year of operating. What confuses and worries me though is the fact that our English content is not ranking at all. The aim for the English content is to be general and reaching audiences worldwide. But as you can see in the image attached, we are doing really bad for example in UK, which is one of our main markets. I've been doing active keyword research, built high quality and natural links and writing long and keyword rich content on our blog but still our rankings don't seem to change outside Finland. I would be interested in knowing, what I am doing wrong and what would be the right steps to start improving the situation?
International SEO | | tuomashaapala0 -
Traffic drop after hreflang tags added
We operate one company with two websites each serving a different location, one targeting EU customers and the other targeting US customers. thespacecollective.com (EU customers) thespacecollective.com/us/ (US customers) We have always had canonical tags in place, but we added the following hreflang tags two weeks ago (apparently this is best practice); EU site (thespacecollective.com) US site (thespacecollective.com/us/) Literally the same day we added the above hreflang tags our traffic dropped off a cliff (we have lost around 70-80% on the EU site, and after a minor recovery, 50% on the US site). Now, my first instinct is to remove the tags entirely and go back to just using canonical, but if this is truly best practice, that could do more damage than good. This is the only change that has been made in recent weeks regarding SEO. Is there something obvious that I am missing because it looks correct to me?
International SEO | | moon-boots0 -
International SEO - Targeting US and UK markets
Hi folks, i have a client who is based in italy and they set up a site that sells travel experiences in the sout of Italy (the site currently sit on a server in Italy). The site has been set up as gTLDs: www.example.com They only want to target the US and the UK market to promote their travel experiences and the site has only the english version (the site does not currently offer an italian version). If they decide to go for the gTLDs and not actually change to a ccTLDs (which would be ideal from my point of view) how are the steps to be taken to set this up correctly on GSC? They currently only have one property registered on GSC: www.exapmple.com therefore i guess the next steps are: Add new property - www.example.com/uk and and set up geo targeting for UK Existing property - www.example.com/ set up geo targeting for US In case the client does not have the budget to optimise the content for american and british languages, would still make sense to have 2 separate property in GSC (example.com for US market and example.com/uk for UK market)? Few considerations: Add canonical tag to avoid duplicate content across the two versions of the site (in the event there is no budget to optimise the content for US and UK market)? Thank you all in advance for looking into this David
International SEO | | Davide19840 -
Prevent us.domainname ranking for UK searches
Hi Moz Community, I'd appreciate any advice you can offer on this. We have a client with international offices, and we manage the website and SEO for some of these offices, including UK. Others, such as their US office, are managed by another agency. All websites have the same domain name, but differ in their sub domains depending on their targeted country, e.g. uk.domainname for UK, us.domainname for US. All are .com. The US office's agency re-desgined their us.domainname website earlier this year. We noticed a couple of months ago that the US website started to outrank the uk.domainname website for branded searches on Google from the UK. After some investigation, we found that their agency had incorrectly implemented hreflang tags and set the us sub-domain as the hreflang="x-default" instead of www.domainname. They corrected this and uk.domainname is now the first organic result on Google. However, us.domainname has remained in 2nd place for organic brand searches (from Google UK) for the past two months, when we were hoping that this would have dropped out of the rankings by now. We have asked the US office to ensure that their International Targeting is set to United States in Google Search Console, but have no way of knowing if this has actually been done. Does anyone have experience of this? Is there anything else we could try to stop the US site ranking for Google UK, or is it just a matter of waiting? Many thanks, James
International SEO | | mcmnetjames0 -
Multiple Regional Domains - such as .co.uk / .de etc for one brand
Hello, We are in the process of building up our version 2 for our site, currently we have only one domain (i.e. xxxxx.com). Our target audience is distributed among various regions and speak different languages, we would like to know which will benefit us more: a) by having one root domain and then having folders based on automatic IP detection, for example the customer opening a website in Japan would see the domain as: www.xxxx.com/jp. B) or is it better to have different domains so in the above case it will be www.xxxx.co.jp. The content on the site will be different based on the regional demand, so of course the language will be Japanese and the content will also be aligned with the Japanese community. We plan to start with 5 different markets (UK/US/AU, Japan, China, Germany, Spanish speaking countries). We would appreciate if you can suggest us the best route to achieve the best results. Thank you, SK
International SEO | | sidkumar0 -
What is the best way to make country specific IP redirect for only product pricng pages?
My website has 3 services and its price will be different for US/EU/Developed world and Asian/African countries.Apart from pricing page, all other things remain same. I want to use IP based redirect .I heard this thing is called cloaking and used by black-hat guys. What kind of instructions should I give to my web developer to look best to Google/Search bots and correctly show visitors the intended prices.Is there any caution to be taken care of. Thanks for your time
International SEO | | RyanSat0 -
Does it matter whether you use /en vs /uk
I have a global site targeting many countries including the UK which is the only English language site. Does it matter whether I use /en or /uk for the UK sub-folder? If I already have /en in place, but my Google UK listings are struggling, will it benefit me to switch to /uk? I honestly don't think it matters too much, but given the choice would've gone for the /uk I'm trying to weigh up whether it is worth the effort of changing it.
International SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie0 -
How can I view Google.com SERPs from outside the US?
If I go to Google.com I get redirected back to Google.co.uk and search results have a UK bias. I'm trying to research the US market and have a hazy recolection of Rand demonstrating how you can add a few characters to the google.co.uk url to see US results - just can't remember what video I saw it in. Any ideas? Thanks a lot
International SEO | | trbaldwin0