Arch Support Sandals Australia: Why Almost Nobody Searches Orthopaedic

Australian footwear retailers argue about this in private and never publish the numbers. So we are publishing ours.

Between 24 April 2025 and 22 August 2026, Australian shoppers reached Harper Australia through 465 distinct Google searches about supportive footwear. Not 465 searches. 465 different ways of asking. We pulled every one of them out of Google Search Console, stripped out anyone searching our brand name, and counted what was left.

The headline finding is a spelling problem, and it costs Australian retailers money every day.

Australians do not spell it the Australian way

Every style guide in this country spells it orthopaedic. The Australasian Orthopaedic Association spells it orthopaedic. Australian shoppers type orthopedic.

Share of 3,717 Australian impressions. Categories can overlap where one search uses two terms, for example orthopedic sandals with arch support.

The American spelling beats the Australian one by six to one. If your product titles, collection names and page headings only ever say orthopaedic, you are invisible to roughly a third of the people looking for exactly what you sell.

We had this wrong ourselves. Our own catalogue still carries both spellings inconsistently, which is how we noticed.

People name the feature, not the condition

Look at the bottom of that chart. Plantar fasciitis: one impression in sixteen months. Bunions: nine. The medical vocabulary that fills product descriptions barely appears in the search bar.

What people actually type is arch support. It is the single largest bucket, and it is not a diagnosis. It is a description of a thing the shoe does. Shoppers are not self diagnosing. They are shopping for a feature they can feel.

The practical version of this: a product page titled "orthopaedic sandal for plantar fasciitis relief" is written for a search almost nobody performs. One titled "sandals with arch support" is written for the one they do.

Three quarters of it is sandals

Share of the same 3,717 impressions, by the product word used in the search.

Supportive footwear is not a shoe category in the Australian mind. It is a sandal category. Sandals take 74.1% of the demand on their own, and everything else combined, including the entire generic "shoes" bucket, splits the remaining quarter.

That is a stock decision as much as a copy decision.

The long tail is the majority

Of those 465 phrasings, 213 appeared exactly once. Not once a month. Once, in sixteen months.

The ten biggest searches together account for 42.9% of impressions. The other 455 carry the rest. That is the number that should change how a small retailer thinks about keyword research: over half the demand arrives through phrasings no keyword tool will ever show you, because individually they have no volume at all.

They only exist in aggregate, and they only exist in your own Search Console.

85.4% of it is a phone

Mobile: 85.4% of impressions. Desktop: 14.3%. Tablet: 0.3%.

Someone is standing up, feeling it in their feet, and reaching for their phone. Anything that assumes a considered desktop research session, long comparison tables, sizing charts that need pinching, is built for the 14%.

One search in six says "australia"

17.0% of impressions came from searches that explicitly contain the word australia, spread across 52 different formulations: ladies orthotic sandals australia, orthopedic shoes australia, womens orthopedic sandals australia.

Nobody adds a country to a search unless they have been burned. This is shoppers manually filtering out overseas stores after a bad experience with shipping times or returns. Stating where you ship from, in plain words, near the price, is not a trust badge exercise. It answers a question one shopper in six is already typing.

What we are doing about it

Publishing our own weaknesses is part of the point. Our average position on this group is 17.6. We are on page two for searches we should own, and our click through rate of 2.74% says that even when we appear, we are not the answer people were looking for.

We are rewriting our supportive footwear pages around the words above rather than the words we assumed. If you sell in this category in Australia, you are welcome to do the same with these numbers.

Related reading: why your feet hurt and how arch support actually helps. Our current range is in orthopedic and orthotic sandals and shoes and women's shoes and sandals.