“Two nations divided by a common language” is a quote often attributed to George Bernard Shaw and I think it’s a pretty good one. In general going global for websites is pretty easy and I have been lucky enough to get lots of traffic for my websites from all the english language speakers around the world. That being said even with english language sites there are super interesting differences. I have spent my time on cocktailmaking.co.uk optimizing for the word cocktails and phrases like cocktail recipes (which I am lucky enough to own in the UK) and “vodka cocktail recipes” etc… Globally this doesn’t look sensible:
Zooming in on UK only data a different result comes out:
The US data completes this picture:
In general I strongly believe that users from different countries are more similar that different. They all want great service, the web is better for all of them when experienced with their friends and a big red button will get anyone to click :). That being said you have to be careful about the details of how you approach things. When british people are looking for a cocktail they search for “cocktail recipes”, “vodka cocktail recipes”, etc… 5x more than “drink recipes” When Americans are doing the same they search for “drink recipes” 3x more than “cocktail recipes”. My british bias made me optimize for the wrong words on total volume.
Comments