US vs British/Australian English in Website Copywriting

October 17, 2008 • Glenn Murray

Which do you use? US or British (Australian) English in your web copy?

Your website is globally accessible, so your readers could come from anywhere. It may seem a trivial consideration, but many readers really care. British readers, for instance, tend to have a strong preference for British English. US readers tend to prefer US English. (Australian readers prefer British English, but will usually tolerate both.)

What’s more, it’s not just a question of pleasing readers when they’re actually reading your copy. You may also have to consider the search engines. e.g. What do you do if half your target audience Googles “search engine optimisation” (with an “s) to find you, and the other half Googles “search engine optimization” (with a “z”)? Although Google is smart enough to know that “search engine optimization” is the same as “search engine optimisation”, if someone searches for “search engine optimization” (with a “z”), most of the results will be about “search engine optimization” with a “z”. And the opposite applies when someone searches for “search engine optimisation” (with an “s”).

So in reality, your primary concern should be the search engines. Whatever choice you make could significantly impact the traffic you actually attract, not just how that traffic reacts to your copy.

Fortunately, for most businesses, it’s not the quandry it might first appear to be. To answer the question, just think about your target audience. Unless your business is truly global, you’ll probably be most interested in customers from a particular country. That being the case, just use whatever version of English they use. If your target audience is American, use US English. If Australian or British, use British English.

It only becomes tricky if you’re juggling audiences. If you’re a multinational, there’s a very simple answer: create localised versions of your site (one for US, one for Australia, one for Britain, etc.). You’ll probably have non-language reasons for doing this anyway; things like currency, legal and product versions.

However, if you’re a small business, you have to make compromises. You can either figure out which of your audiences delivers the best revenue and write for them, or you can try to write for both audiences (i.e. sometimes use US English, and sometimes use British English). The problem with the latter approach is that many readers will notice the inconsistency, and thus pay more attention to your choice of language. The other problem is that you’ll be diluting your keyword density for both the US version of your keyword and the British version, so you may, in fact, harm your search engine ranking for both audiences. (But that’s a discussion for another day…)