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I'm finishing of a website for a Blues band called Zoë Schwarz Blue Commotion, her name is Zoë.
In terms of SEO do the search engines see any difference between Zoë and Zoe. I think the vast majority of people when searching will type Zoe as most people won't know where the ë is.
It would be nice to use her name Zoë but would this affect our SEO efforts?
No, it doesn't matter (at least not to Google and Bing). My language has a number of accented characters and searches both with and without the accent return the same results.
Most tellingly, the highlighted keywords in the search results snippets ignore the accent.
Google also seems to handle some common substitutions. For example searches using a 'd' where an eth 'ð' should properly be used, will turn up results with the correct spelling. Bing fails on this one.
All in all, you are perfectly safe in using "Zoë" on your site, at least as far as Google and Bing is concerned. It will also have the bonus that any searches where the 'ë' character is used, you will turn up higher as you aren't competing with the plain "Zoe" search term.
