The importance of accents in SEO

When launching a search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign, businesses may also consider targeting international audiences and in these cases, does the use of accents over certain letters matter?

In a post for Search Engine Watch, Andy Atkins-Kruger said that it has been argued that if a phrase is placed into Google without such accents, the search engine will do the work of adding them.

However, he adds that while sometimes diacritics count as simply a character with added accent, they can also occasionally stand for an entirely additional letter in the alphabet.

Mr Atkins-Kruger carried out a search study using the German character the umlaut, two dots which appear above a u, o or a and used Google's keyword tool to look at the various spellings of the German phrase Billigfluge - cheap flights.

"This exercise produces some stunning findings. The search results for all of these searches are different, which suggests - but doesn't guarantee - that the algorithm treats them all differently," he said, adding that that rankings also varied.

Due to this, he claimed there were opportunities in SEO for "clever" marketers.

In an earlier post, Mr Atkins-Kruger explained that keywords and page titles should never be literally word-for-word translated for use on websites targeting an international audience, but a person who speaks the language should translate the content using the most common phrases.

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