Your sign says Kāneʻohe. Your customer types “kaneohe plumber” with one thumb at a red light. Your website, your Business Profile and your structured data each spell it slightly differently. Which version should you use, and does Google care?
This guide separates what Google actually documents from what is simply observed in practice, and gives you a consistent way to write Hawaiian place names that respects the language and still meets searchers where they are. Each claim below is labelled so you can tell which is which.
The two marks, briefly
- The ʻokina (ʻ) marks a glottal stop, a consonant in Hawaiian. It is its own character (Unicode U+02BB), not an apostrophe (') and not a closing quotation mark (’), although both are often typed in its place.
- The kahakō is the line over a vowel (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū) that marks it as long. It changes pronunciation and, in many words, meaning.
Written fully, the state is Hawaiʻi, and its towns include Līhuʻe, Kāneʻohe, Haleʻiwa and Waikīkī. Typed quickly, they become hawaii, lihue, kaneohe, haleiwa and waikiki.
How people actually type
What Google documents, and what it doesn’t
What we could not find is any Google documentation saying exactly how its systems treat ʻokina and kahakō: whether “Līhuʻe” and “Lihue” are always treated as the same word, or how often results differ. So this guide makes no claim either way.
The practical upshot: you don’t need to choose the unmarked spelling to be found, and you shouldn’t try to cover every variant in your titles and headings. Write clearly and consistently, then let your own data tell you if something needs attention.
Same name, different place
Spelling is only half of it. Several Hawaii place names belong to more than one place, and that causes more confusion than any diacritic.
| Written form | Often typed | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Kailua | kailua | The Windward Oʻahu town. Write “Kailua, Oʻahu” when it matters. |
| Kailua-Kona | kona, kailua kona | On Hawaiʻi Island, and usually just called Kona. Don’t shorten it to “Kailua”. |
| Waimea | waimea | A town on Kauaʻi, a town on Hawaiʻi Island (also called Kamuela), and a bay and valley on Oʻahu’s North Shore. |
| Hawaiʻi | hawaii | Both the state and the largest island. Say “Hawaiʻi Island” for the island. |
| Līhuʻe | lihue | The main town on Kauaʻi. |
| Kāneʻohe | kaneohe | Windward Oʻahu, next to Kailua. |
| Haleʻiwa | haleiwa | North Shore of Oʻahu. |
The fix is the same each time: name the island alongside the town wherever someone could reasonably be confused, in your page copy, your service-area page and your contact details.
A consistent house style
Pick one way of writing each name and use it everywhere you control. We recommend the correct Hawaiian spelling in everything people read: it is accurate, and it shows local customers you took care. Whatever you choose, consistency matters more than the choice.
| Where | What to do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Page title and H1 | Use your house spelling once: “Water Heater Repair in Kāneʻohe, Oʻahu”. | Google’s title guidance warns against stacking variants such as “Kaneohe, Kāneʻohe, Kaneʻohe”. |
| Body copy | Write naturally. On a page about one town, mentioning the common unmarked form once (“often written Kaneohe”) can help readers. | Our practice: one natural mention helps people recognize the name; repetition doesn’t. |
| Business Profile name | Use your real-world business name exactly as on your signage, marks or no marks. | Google’s guidelines ask for the name used on signage and stationery. |
| Address and schema | Make the address in your structured data match the address shown on the page. | Structured data must be a true representation of the visible page. |
| URLs | Use plain letters in slugs: /locations/kaneohe/ rather than /locations/kāneʻohe/. | Our practice: non-ASCII characters become percent-encoded in shared links and are easy to mistype. |
Check which spellings bring impressions
Search Console shows the queries your site appeared for. Here is how to see which spellings matter for you.
- Open Performance → Search results and set the date range to the last 3 or 6 months.
- Add a filter: Query → Queries containing and enter the plain spelling, e.g.
kaneohe. Note impressions and clicks. - Repeat with the marked spelling,
kāneʻohe, and compare. - To see every variant at once, choose Custom (regex) and Matches regex, for example
k[aā]ne[ʻ'’]?oheorl[iī]hu[ʻ'’]?e. - Switch to the Pages tab with the filter on to see which pages those searches land on.
If one spelling brings most of your impressions and a page isn’t showing for it, look first at whether the page clearly covers that place and service at all. Check that before you change any spelling. If you’d like a second pair of eyes, the Local Search Scorecard is a quick start, and our SEO audit includes a Search Console review. Serving more than one town or island? Read local SEO for businesses that serve several islands next.