Do Letters With Accents Affect SEO?

[Sandicliffe]

Hi Guys,

My company has a franchise of a foreign company that uses an accent/foreign letter in its brand name. We have to refer to this franchise with this symbol on our website to meet their standards.

I've done some research on this but its not conclusive, so i was wondering whether anyone here can confirm this for me;

Will using the letter with this symbol impair our rankings for this franchise name? Obviously as a UK business people search for this franchise with a regular letter and not the accented one. I would have thought that Google is clever enough to recognise the meaning of the accented letter by now and therefore it wouldn't affect rankings (much). Furthermore, do you think that it would make any difference to use the HTML element to represent the accent rather than copy and pasting the symbol onto our website? I would've thought this would help Google pick it up, but it might not make a difference anyway!

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

Sam

[Yeeply.com]

Hello Sam,

I was about to answer you but I found a similar question in Moz some years ago. Please, take a look: http://moz.com/community/q/google-and-keywords-with-and-without-accents-how-to-approach-optimization-for-both

Hope this helps and clarify things to you!

Luis

[DirkC]

Just to add to the answer of Luis - in most cases Google is quite capable of guessing the intention of the searcher.

Even in countries that traditionally have a lot of accents, a lot of people are searching for the words without the accents. This is probably partially due to the fact that on mobile it's not always easy to get the accents right, but also due to laziness (it's generally faster to just type the word without the accents).

If you search on google.fr for référencement (correct spelling) or referencement - the results are identical. All the results however use the correct spelling in the meta description & title.(if you check Google trends for this keyword you'll notice that the wrong spelling is even slightly more popular than the correct version) 
If you take the example given in the question Luis is referencing - the results for Google.es for cursos de inglés & cursos de ingles are now identical as well

So my advice would be to use the correct spelling on your page - Google should normally be able to figure it out. 
Just make sure that you escape the foreign characters in your HTML.

rgds,

Dirk

[Stramark]

The franchise name is a brand name i presume. In that case is does not make any SEO difference. You will rank for your brandname anyway. Choose the most correct version and just run with it. The authority is going to be there!

If the franchise name is something like carinsurance.nl.. THEN you have an interresting case.

In the dutch language the word:

"jaloezieën" is the correct way of writing. In google everyone uses "jaloezieen". The results on the google page are different. Based on my research the main difference is due to the incomming links beeing spelled in the correct and the incorrect way.

[Sandicliffe]

Hi there,

thanks a lot for your response!

The franchise is a brand name, one that we look after but it is not anywhere in our own brand name. So if you think of a PC shop that sells Apple products, the brand name is Apple but the shop itself has nothing to do with apple and just sells their products - this is the case for us. Would this change your opinion on how to deal with it?

Thanks

Sam

[Sandicliffe]

Thanks a lot for your response here, Dirk.

Just to clarify - when you state to use the **correct **spelling on the page, am i correct in assuming you are meaning the spelling with the accent?

and with the foreign characters in HTML, by this are you meaning to use the proper HTML elements in every case rather than copy and pasting symbols in?

Apologies for asking these simple questions, but just wanted to make sure.

Kind Regards

Sam

[Sandicliffe]

That was a helpful post - thanks for helping out.

Sam

[DirkC]

Hi Sam,

To clarify - for me the correct spelling is the spelling using the accents. For the foreign characters I meant to encode them. In the example above: not use référencement in the HTML but rather référencement

rgds

Dirk

[Sandicliffe]

Hi Dirk,

perfect, thanks a lot for clarifying.

All the best.

Sam