Greek SEO: accents, Greeklish and Cyprus vs Greece wording

Accents: write correct Greek

Many people in Cyprus and Greece type searches without accents, because it is faster on a phone. Business owners often ask me if they should remove accents from their pages to match. The answer is no.

Google explained how this works in a Search Central blog post. When someone searches with an accented word, Google considers pages that have the word with and without the accent. When someone searches without the accent, Google also considers both versions. The post adds that the set of letters treated as equal depends on the searcher's interface language, because each language has its own accent rules. The post is old, from 2006, but it is still on Google's site and describes the basic approach.

Google Ads works in a similar way. Google's help page on keyword close variants lists accents among the small differences it treats as close matches, together with misspellings, plurals and abbreviations.

So write proper Greek, with accents, for your readers. It looks professional, and it reads better. Do not add a second, unaccented copy of your text for Google.

Greeklish: real, but messy

Greeklish is Greek written in Latin letters, like "kalimera" for "καλημέρα". It started in the early internet years, when computers often could not show Greek letters.

Linguist Jannis Androutsopoulos studied it in a 2009 chapter on Greeklish. He found there is no single way to write it. Some people write by sound, others copy the Greek keyboard, and others copy how letters look, using "8" for θ, for example. His example is the word ζωή, which can appear as "zoi", "zvh" or "zwh". He also found that its use was falling in Greece as Greek letters became easy to type, and was becoming more common in communication with Greeks abroad.

For SEO, this means three things:

• There is no single Greeklish keyword. A word can have several Latin spellings, so the search demand is split.
• Brand and place names matter most. People often type a shop name, a product model or a town in Latin letters, like "Lefkosia" or "Nicosia" instead of "Λευκωσία".
• Do not stuff Greeklish into your copy. A page full of Latin-letter Greek reads badly and looks like spam. Instead, make sure your business name, address and key place names appear in both scripts where it feels natural, such as in your contact page and Google Business Profile.

Cyprus and Greece: same language, different searches

Greek in Cyprus and Greek in Greece are not the same in daily use. In my experience, Cypriots mix in more local words and English terms, place names are different, and people search for local services in their own area. A keyword list built for Athens will miss how people in Limassol actually search, and the other way round.

That is why I always run keyword research twice for businesses that sell in both countries: once with the location set to Cyprus, and once with it set to Greece. Google says the filters in Keyword Planner let you set language and location, so use them. The results often differ more than people expect, both in which words are used and in how much demand there is.

I will not quote search volumes here, because they change by product and season, and tools give only estimates. The method is what matters: research each market on its own, then compare.

.com.cy, .gr and hreflang

Google's guide on multi-regional and multilingual sites says country-code domains, like .cy and .gr, give "a strong signal to both users and search engines" that a site is meant for that country. Other signals include hreflang, local addresses, phone numbers and currency.

The same guide makes a few points that matter here:

• Google works out the language of a page from the visible text. It does not use the HTML lang attribute or the URL for that.
• Do not redirect visitors automatically to another language or country version. Give them links to choose.
• Keep one language per page. Do not put Greek and English side by side on the same page.
• If you have very similar pages in the same language for different countries, pick a preferred version and use canonical and hreflang tags.

Hreflang is a small tag that tells Google "this page is the Greek version for Cyprus, and that one is the Greek version for Greece". Google's hreflang guide explains the format: language code first, then an optional country code. So Greek for Cyprus is el-CY and Greek for Greece is el-GR. Each version must list itself and all the other versions. If two pages do not point to each other, Google ignores the tags. There is also an x-default value for a fallback page, such as a language selector.

What this means for businesses in Cyprus and Greece

If you only sell in one country, the setup is simple: one domain, correct Greek, and keyword research for that market. A .com.cy for a Cypriot shop or a .gr for a Greek one already tells Google where you belong.

If you sell in both, decide early. One option is two domains, .com.cy and .gr, each with its own wording and delivery details. The other is one site with folders, like /cy/ and /gr/, linked with hreflang. Both can work. What does not work is one set of Greek pages trying to please both markets, with Cyprus delivery details on a page that ranks in Athens.

At the retailer I worked for in Cyprus, and on the clinic sites I build in Nicosia, the same rules always applied: write natural Greek with accents, add English where your customers use it, and let Search Console tell you how people really search. Most Cypriot sites also need an English version, because many customers search in English. That is a separate language version, with its own hreflang tag, not a translation pasted under the Greek.

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Sources

1. How search results may differ based on accented characters and interface languages, Google Search Central Blog, September 2006
2. Keyword close variants: Definition, Google Ads Help
3. How to Find Keywords with Keyword Planner, Google Ads
4. 'Greeklish': Transliteration Practice and Discourse in the Context of Computer-Mediated Digraphia, Jannis Androutsopoulos, Ashgate, 2009
5. Managing Multi-Regional and Multilingual Sites, Google Search Central, December 2025
6. Localized Versions of your Pages, Google Search Central, September 2026