Australian shoppers favour orthopedic over orthopaedic

Harper Australia has published search data showing Australian shoppers use the American spelling "orthopedic" far more often than "orthopaedic" when searching for supportive footwear. The pattern suggests online merchants may miss demand when they localise catalogues only in Australian English.

The figures come from 16 months of Harper Australia's Google Search Console records, with brand terms removed. Across 465 distinct search phrasings and 3,717 impressions, "orthopedic" generated 1,288 impressions, compared with 212 for "orthopaedic".

The data points to a gap between the language retailers use in product catalogues and the terms shoppers enter into search engines. Harper Australia argued this is mainly a catalogue and taxonomy issue rather than an advertising budget issue, because the wording search engines read often appears in product feeds, collection titles, filters and structured data that may have been set years earlier.

That matters because category names and page titles are often created once and then left unchanged. Retailers that use only the local spelling across a site may be less visible to customers using a more common alternative spelling for the same product.

Search behaviour

Harper Australia's data also showed a broader mismatch between product copy and customer search behaviour. Terms linked to medical diagnoses appeared rarely in the retailer's records, even though those words are often used heavily in footwear product descriptions.

The term "plantar fasciitis", commonly associated with supportive footwear, appeared once during the 16-month period. "Bunions" appeared nine times. By contrast, "arch support" ranked above medical terms, suggesting shoppers were more likely to describe the product feature they wanted than a diagnosis.

This suggests catalogues written in clinical language may fail to match the wording customers actually use. Searches were more likely to focus on features such as arch support, cushioned soles, wide fit and all-day comfort than on formal medical terminology.

Long tail

Another finding was the spread of search demand across many low-volume phrases. Of the 465 distinct phrasings in the data set, 213 appeared exactly once.

That indicates a large share of relevant search demand sits in what marketers typically call the long tail, rather than in a small number of high-volume keywords. For retailers, this can make catalogue structure and wording more important than a narrow focus on a short list of headline search terms.

Harper Australia said the implications extend beyond footwear. It cited other Australian and American English word pairs, including "paediatric" and "pediatric", "jewellery" and "jewelry", "tyre" and "tire", and "colour" and "color" in product attributes.

In categories where American spelling dominates online usage, merchants could face the same issue if they rely on only one localised version of a term. Harper Australia said the practical response is not to replace Australian spelling in customer-facing text, but to ensure both versions appear somewhere search engines can read, such as feeds, alternative titles and on-page copy.

Harper Australia said it is making its underlying figures available to other Australian retailers and publishers that want to review or reproduce the analysis using their own Search Console records. It added that the method could be carried out with a Search Console export and a spreadsheet.

The retailer positioned the findings as relevant to Australian eCommerce more broadly, particularly for merchants whose product taxonomies were built around localisation conventions rather than observed search behaviour. In practice, search visibility may depend less on whether language is technically correct in local usage and more on whether catalogue metadata reflects the words customers actually enter.

Harper Australia said Australian online retailers "may be cutting themselves off from the larger half of their own customers" when they localise product catalogues only in Australian English.