How to formulate keyword in language that has cases and foreign characters

[StatybosMarketingas]

Hello everybody,

this is my first but foremost headache causing question that i can't seem to find answear to for a month already.

I live in Lithuania - small eastern European country and my native language has all "fancy" things that one could probably immagine (tenses, cases, compound forms, foreign letters: ąčęėį..., genders, declensions etc.)

The problem is: how to formulate keywords correctly for my SEO to get the best results?

I'll try to explain my problem in detail by using few different cases on the same aspect:

1. If i'm using keyword in nominative case which is "atvirkštinis stogas" (reverse roof eng.) - i usually can't follow all of the recommendations for SEO: add keyword in topic, follow the keyword rate in text, because the same keyword will be repeated for numerous times but in many different forms because of the nature of language itself i.e. genitive case - "atvirkštiniam stogui", locative - "atvirkštiniame stoge".

Even MOZ page analysis doesn't recognize these cases as the same keyword. How about Google? Searching for keywords in different cases also gives slightly different results - some websites drop by 5 - 7 places on google searchpage No.1.

Possible solutions:

a) Formulate all keywords in text by using only nominative case which would totaly limit writer to a first-former kid writting capabilities and result in nobody reading the text at all.

b) Formulate keywords according to mostly used keyword in text, which would affect organic search because everybody is searching for keywords in nominative case.

Note that everybody here in Lithuania usually use the nominative case in search window on google.

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2. The use of foreign letters (ąčęėįšųž).

If we use the same keyword "atvirkštinis stogas", we have only one letter "š" that is causing a problem.
In normal texts we use all of these letters, HOWEVER, nobody is ever writting these letters while searching for keyword in google, so normally they would search for "atvirkstinis stogas" with "s" instead of "š". If you search for these two keywords "atvirkštinis stogas" and "atvirkstinis stogas" you also get slightly different results.

Possible solutions:

1. Use keyword with foreign letters and have perversed search results, because everybody will still search for keywords without them.

2. Use keyword without foreign letters which will affect SEO and tell me that I don't have any of my keywords in text, topic, url, etc.

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Any ideas on how to solve these puzzles?

[LynnPatchett]

HI,

I feel your pain coming from Greece with many of the same issues regarding how people search vs how the language is 'properly' written.

I cannot give you a definitive answer but I will tell you how I approach it.

1. ALWAYS write site texts in a grammatically correct way.
I cannot bring myself to use foreign letters in place of accented letters or write greek words using english characters even though that is often how people search for things. It looks totally spammy and unprofessional in my opinion so it is a non starter.

2. The moz page grading engine has a lot of trouble with foreign languages and their different tense cases. I think google has a better understanding of this complexity and is likely to only get better at understanding that words in different tenses are all referring to the same subject.

So with the above in mind I would suggest for your specific questions:

1. Write the texts in a grammatically correct way that serves the interests of you visitors and present your subject in a proper way. A good writer should be able to find a way to include a variety of tenses and phrases that address the same subject. Depending on the use of the text you can get an 'extra' nominative case into places like a caption for a photo for example.  If you search for 'atvirkštinis stogas' you will see already that google is bolding some of the search results that are not exactly that phrase (stogo, stogai) which I assume are a case and plural variation(?). So google does appear to understand some of the variations already.

2. For minor foreign character variations it could be worth popping one version into the page in a non obvious place (maybe a img alt text?). I am not really saying this is a good tactic - but it might be worth testing to see what happens. Generally if you are ranking strongly for the properly written phrase then you should be pretty strong already for the same phrase using a non accented character in place of an accented one and a single appearance of it in the page might be enough to make the difference.

Hope it helps!