Band of Slugs

Why Being British Makes For Good SEO

Surely just being British can’t help your search engine optimisation?

If you look at the current emerging markets – primarily China and India – they have a lot of advantages; namely low cost labour. But what they don’t have, is a good command of the most important language in the world of business. This isn’t a slight on the good name of Indian or Chinese education – but the truth is it takes years and years to fully understand the ins and outs of any language. This is particularly true of English, which is constantly expanding.

Telecoms and banking giants outsource their telephone-based servcies to Asia, and in order that the call handlers have a good grasp of the kind of colloquial English they are likely to encounter from Brits and Americans, they put their workers in front of various English language soap operas. But the truth is that these operations have had limited success – with many UK corporations eventually deciding to use UK-based call centres as a marketing tool (think NatWest).

The advantages of knowing a language inside out are even more pronounced when it comes to SEO. You have a few seconds to convince someone to hang around on a website; if this home page reads like it has been copywritten by someone who doesn’t have English as their first language, it’s going to turn potential customers off straight away. Equally, understanding how UK English or US English is used by people is essential in being able to making a website respond effectively to these searches.

People who optimise websites with a full grasp of the English language have a distinct advantage. And Brits have a direct line to the biggest web-based market in the world – the USA. No wonder some of the most successful SEO companies in the world are based in the UK.