Google announced their new virtual keyboards in a post here. This is to give searchers more flexibility to search in their native language with their respective alphabets.
This makes it easier for searchers to search in their native language even if they do not have a keyboard with their alphabet. Below are the languages now available with virtual keyboards.
If your language is not listed you can vote for your language to be added to virtual keyboards here:
I feel that for SEO the impact will be less grammatically incorrect organic keyword referrals from foreign languages. So instead of seeing this in your analytics
“Ano” you would see this “Año” instead. (Although Spanish is not yet supported) This may also affect keyword search metrics for ungrammatically correct searches in the Google tool.
2 Comments
This is a great tool. We do a lot of work with localization. I personally have two keyboards German and English, but often have to proof work in other languages as well as find sites using keywords in various languages. This can be a real pain if you have to rely on key combinations to use unique characters.Although I’m not sure how much affect it will have on analytics results as if you are localizing a site most of the users will most likely have the correct keyboard for their language.
I would definitely appreciate a virtual keyboard that will let me input the accent characters