Because we predominantly write our eBooks and articles in English, our website’s publications are mostly served to users who search in English by using Search Engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo, and so on.
Hence, it makes perfect sense that most of our visitors would originate from countries that have English as their primary language.
Now, when we look at our website statistics we indeed see that about 45% of our visitors come from the United States. Another 20% comes from other English speaking countries, such as Canada, Australia, South Africa, Great Britain, Ireland, Singapore, Hong Kong, and New Zealand.
Then there’s about 20% coming from a variety of European countries (Denmark, Netherlands, France, Sweden, Spain, Germany, Italy, Greece, etc.) and another 15% comes from other countries, such as Indonesia, India, South Korea, Thailand, Japan, China, etc. All these countries don’t have English as their main language, but for some reason or the other there are people there who now and again search in English.
What we’ve also noticed is that website visitors originating from Thailand, Japan, and Indonesia are often expats or tourists living in or visiting those countries looking for information about massage and bodywork treatments or training (usually in those countries). Sometimes this also counts for India, but then again India also has a large group of people who use English, typically as a secondary language.
At any rate, it’s clear that our website heavily depends on people in countries that have English as their main language: it involves 65% of our website traffic, that is, about two-thirds of visits. Moreover, about half of our traffic comes from the United States (USA).
Of course, the USA has by far the largest population of all anglophone countries, but there’s more to it than that. One of the issues we face is that we write in American English. Strangely enough, Search Engines have difficulties in establishing or understanding synonyms or understanding different ways of writing words and phrases in English.
For instance, the word De-Armoring (American English) means exactly the same as De-Armouring (British, Canadian, Australian English), but if you search for it in an Internet Search Engine in one way or the other way you will get different results. Another example: it makes quite a difference if you would look for “Abdominal Massage” or alternatively for “Belly Massage.” In fact, the way Search Engines interpret written text is of great impact to us and sometimes we miss quite a lot of traffic to our site that way.
It’s a problem because it would be awkward to start writing articles as a mix of different styles of English just to serve every type of English that’s spoken around the world. Yet, we try to compensate that by mentioning synonyms in our articles if applicable, or by having so-called meta titles in another style of English. However, that doesn’t always solve the problem.
The thing is that Search Engines really don’t understand article content and its context well, although they say they do, while additionally boasting about their “magnificent” AI-enabled search capabilities. It means that they often only look at the exact keywords in titles or at what they think (the type or variation of) the language is to subsequently only serve content that matches the user’s (particular style of) language or serve articles that have a title that has an exact match with the user’s keywords query.
All by all, it makes that we are rather negatively affected by how Internet Search Engines work with the English language, meaning that they horribly fail to discern when words or content mean the same thing regardless the country the English speaking person comes from.
It’s a real bother, and Search Engines are still very far away from actually understanding content and context, but we hope that with the rise and further development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology this aspect will become better in the near future.
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