Keywords with different spelling depending on country.

[Lilala_Kids]

Hello,

My product sells in both USA and UK, childrens sleepwear.  I am not quite sure whether my onsite optimisation should be for "pajamas" or "pyjamas", or do I need both terms? Can someone please advise the best option?

Thanks

Astrid

[StephanSolomonidis]

It depends how much time and money you have to devote to this, but here are a few suggestions:

• Create two subfolders for your site content: /en-gb/ and /en-US/. All your UK-focused content can go in the en-gb folder, and US content in the en-US folder. Use the country-appropriate spellings, and ideally tailor the actual page copy: your two audiences probably use quite different turns of phrase; one marketing message may be more resonant with a US audience than a UK one, etc.

• Ensure that every page that has both a UK and a US version has hreflang properly implemented. That means that, if we have URLs "www.example.com/en-gb/product-1.html" and "www.example.com/en-US/product-1.html", both talking about the same product, the following two hreflang tags must go on both of those pages:

• If the majority of your customers are based in the US, or speak US English, you may wish to make that the default language in your hreflang tags. To do so, just change my example above to the following format:

All that's changed is that the en-US pages are now hreflang="x-default", which signals to Google that, unless a user has a preference for British English, they should be served the US English content.

• Do not redirect users from one version of the site to another based on their IP addresses, as this will mean Google cannot crawl the UK version of your site. You might want to do something like Amazon does, where if a UK-based user visits the US version of Amazon, a banner appears at the top of the page to suggest they visit the UK site, and provides a link to amazon.co.uk. That's a good example of suggesting something useful to your users without forcing a redirect.

[Eric_Rohrback]

In this case I wonder whether it would be appropriate to make separate sections of the site targeting the US and UK. You could then set different hreflang tags on the site to signal you're targeting different regions of the world - see this help guide.

Also check out the international SEO resource from Moz. How's the site currently set up?