With Google’s international focus, it’s very easy to forget that the company has American origins. The company spends a lot of time trying to make its pages for other countries work for that particular area. This is especially true when it comes to pages for other English-speaking countries. It’s why it’s so startling that recent Google UK results have been heavy on US spelling suggestions.

It’s a trend that has been occurring for Google UK for around a year or so. You type in ‘customised site settings’ and the first thing you see on your results is ‘Did you mean customize site settings?’, with a list of US-based sites for you to peruse.

This isn’t something everyone is likely to notice, although a large amount of the population has. It’s amazing how irritating having another country’s language foisted on you can be, particularly to the UK public. The search engine optimisation industry is highly sensitive to this kind of thing, and not only because the suggestion ‘Did you mean search engine optimization?’ makes a bit of an impression on your day. Google’s apparent concentration on US keywords could have a big impact on SEO.

What does this mean for your site?

Google’s repeated lapse into its home brand of English means that US English is not going to go away. US-based keywords are continuing to be important for UK sites and other countries. A smart site knows the importance of international English and will take this into account when forming a keyword list for SEO. You can talk to us at SEO Consult about the impact that various versions of English have on your keyword research.

Including variations of your keywords also means that you have to make some decisions for your SEO implementation. Although it’s such a small thing, changing ’s’ to ‘z’ and back again within one page can get irritating to your site’s users. It stands out as a spelling error, even when technically it’s an error of style. This means that you need to make decisions about what keywords are used where.

Is this the end of English-based English?

The short answer is, no. Too many people are irritated by spelling variations of English that come from outside their country, and if Google hates one thing, it’s irritating its customers. This trend towards US English spelling suggestions is obviously just a glitch, and hopefully one they’ll catch soon.

That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s something you can afford to ignore. While Google is likely to fix this little glitch, it’s not likely to absolutely delineate between the forms of English according to international boundaries. SEO experts have known for a long time that the various spellings of keywords are necessary to take into account in search engine optimisation, as Google and the other search engines look for all spellings of a keyword. Unless there’s some form of violent rebellion by Google UK users who demand UK only spelling on the site, Google is going to continue to consider US spelling in its results.

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