No matter where you live, even if you are in the United States and all of your audience is in the US or even just your own town there can be language that changes from one region to another and even one city to another.

Local Languages Examples

Trunk vs BootLighting Bugs vs FirefliesGarage Sale vs Yard Sale vs Tag Sale vs Rummage SaleCoke vs. Pop vs Soda vs Very Wrong Answers!!Yintz vs. You All vs. Ya'll vs even moreGym Shoes vs Sneakers vs Tennis ShoesExamples above are from Josh Katz's book, Speaking American.

How Language Impacts Keyword Research

Tools and keyword research can only take you so far and then you need to localize your data. A tool may say that sneakers gets X searches and gym shoes gets Y so go with sneakers. What if your audience is who searches gym shoes? The data is wrong.

As you write copy the examples covered may not impact you but there may be similar differences in your own region and industry. Are you a hoagie shop or a sub shop?

Regional and Language Impacts to Writing

Similar to the video to how someone says "Illinois" and "Chicago" things can change based on your regional dialect.

Below is an example of how many dialects there are (and I was told about many that were missed too) just over in the United Kingdom. Give a listen to get an idea of just how different language (spoken and written) can change in very small areas.

Streets, Cars, Shoes, Shopping, All the Things

As you write your site's copy or an ad think about who you are targeting and where they are from. Will someone know what you are talking about? Are you targeting people from out of town? Localization and translation isn't just for when you are doing International keyword research or for other languages but also think about your target audience and words they may use.

Even if none of these examples impact you the whole idea is to speak the language do think about your marketing speak compared to what your customers are saying to your customer service team, sales team and what they actually are searching for online.

Full Transcript

Matt Siltala: [00:00:00] Welcome to another exciting episode of the business of digital podcast, featuring your host, Matt silt and Dave roar. Hey guys, excited to have you on another one of these business of digital podcast episodes. And as always, we have Dave over there, how's it going, bud?

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:18] It is going, it is going crazy for the two of us trying to figure out places to record.

Matt Siltala: [00:00:23] Yes, I'm trapped in the closet right now. So I apologize. To anyone listening, if the normal great sound that I have is not up to par

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:34] something about contractors and a week behind on flooring two weeks behind. Oh three. Oh, that's it. So

Matt Siltala: [00:00:42] anyway, hopefully we're going to find out something today, but yeah.

House was pretty torn up. And so I appreciate you guys dealing with us, but yeah, I'm glad that, uh, you went ahead and started the, you just stopped us from our chat earlier and said, Hey, we need to be recording. So yeah, this has been a fun one already. And so I'm [00:01:00] looking forward to getting into this one, but what we're going to dive into today guys is why brands need to always think a local and they've had a pretty good exercise going.

And this was based on a tweet that you saw, uh, this idea, right? Dave,

Dave Rohrer: [00:01:14] it was based on a tweet, which is based on a book that some people have probably heard of. Um, it's called speaking American by Josh Katz. And over the last couple years, I think I've seen variations of this or some of this data pop up every now and then.

And I just happened to see it. I don't know, last couple of weeks. Oh yeah. This is original. This Facebook post I found, which has a bunch of stuff is from 2017 when the book came out. So we've all seen it from time to time, but it's still interesting. Um, yeah. Um, Oh, I was