Ranking issues for UK vs US spelling - advice please

[StevenHowe]

Hi guys,

I'm reaching out here for what may seem to be a very simple and obvious issue, but not something I can find a good answer for.

We have a .com site hosted in Germany that serves our worldwide audience. The site is in English, but our business language is British (UK) English.

This means that we rank very well for (e.g.) optimisation software but optimization software is nowhere to be found.

The cause of this to me seems obvious; a robot reading those two phrases sees two distinct words. Nonetheless, having seen discussions of a similar nature around the use of plurals in keywords, it would seem to me that Google should have this sort of thing covered.

Am I right or wrong here?

If I'm wrong, then what are my options? I really don't want to have to make a copy of the entire site; apart from the additional effort involved in content upkeep I see this path fraught with duplicate content issues.

Any help is very much appreciated, thanks.

[Hannah_Smith]

Hi Steven,

I'd have to agree with EGOL here - it is something that Google should have figured out - however, to some extent I think they have. For example, if I search for optimisation software here in the UK I get results for pages which are targeted to 'optimization' as well as 'optimisation'.

Whilst I'd guess that the UK spelling might not be helping you in this instance, I wonder if there might also be issues in terms of your site's authority or strength which are also causing you issues.

You've not said which site you're working on, but how does it stack up in terms of domain authority and page authority versus your SERP competition? It might be worth looking into that in the first instance.

The other alternative would be as EGOL highlighted - target 'optimization' instead.

It occurs to me that this might be worth testing - take your page as it is right now but switch out UK for US English and see if your rankings improve.

As you say you could create a US targeted subfolder on your site (I'd recommend implementing hreflang to avoid duplicate content issues) and try to tackle the issue that way - however if you're site isn't authoritative enough it likely still won't rank.

Hope this helps,

Hannah

[EGOL]

Am I right or wrong here?

I agree. I think that Google has lots of problems here.

sulfur and sulphur have lots of problems

gray and grey have enormous problems

From what I see proper nouns for names of people, places and things cause a lot of the problems - but there are lots of webpages that seem to be overlooked or unreasonably ranked.

Any help.....

I don't have any help.  I can only say that I am gunning for American English usage as that is where I think I will get the most traffic - and that is where my website is hosted.