Optimizing for Misspellings? That’s SO Last Year…
This post discusses various reasons why it is not a good idea to spend time optimizing your site for organic traffic through misspelled keywords. I will also discuss good strategies to use with misspelled words within your PPC campaigns. For the examples presented below, I was signed out of Google so I did not receive personalized search results for my queries.
The first reason, but not one of the least important of reasons, I will be discussing is how the change to Google’s Spell Suggest will make any misspellings you choose to optimize for irrelevant…that is unless the searcher consciously decides to search for the misspelling.
See example below:
While this feature doesn’t correct all misspellings, it does a good job at catching what seem to be commonly misspelled words and phrases and auto-correcting them for you.
For words and phrases which are not auto-corrected, you still have a lower chance of your result being seen due to the partial auto-correction feature. This feature will still assume you meant the correct spelling of the word, and help you out by showing the top two correctly spelled results, listing additional misspellings after:
Example:
(For those who are curious, yes – I intentionally cut-off Urban Dictionaries definition – you dirty dirty blog reader you )
It seems like “necklace” would be a popular misspelling, but I guess Google hasn’t caught on to that one yet. My theory is that Google is slowly gathering information from when a user clicks the feature “Did You Mean ___”. If this occurs often enough, it will begin showing the proper spelling of the query. If this theory is accurate, then in time, the vast majority of searches will be auto-corrected for you.
I don’t believe this will affect any purposefully misspelled brand names as much as it does a regular search query. My reasoning behind this is that (in the example below) Google did not show the top two corrected spellings for “decoration” but simply asked “Did you mean decoration” and showed me a list of results with the exact spelling I used.
See example:
You can see additional examples of brand misspellings by Googling:
“krispy”
“qwest”
“rite”
Additional Reasons Why I don’t recommend Optimizing for Misspellings:
I have personally never recommended optimizing websites for misspellings, but it is known to be a common optimization strategy for both organic and paid results. My reason for not recommending this optimization strategy in the past has been “why make your website look unprofessional?” If a customer visits your website and notices several misspelled words, it is unlikely they will come to the conclusion that you have purposefully misspelled these for better search engine optimization. Most visitors would assume you lack basic grammar and spelling skills and discount your professional advice. I know I would place less trust in someone who didn’t take the time to spell check.
Alternatively, you can try to get inbound links pointing to your site, using the misspelled keyword as anchor text. Like the reasons above though, I doubt many webmasters would agree to place a misspelled link on their page. This leaves directories as your next option, and most of the reputable directories would probably correct this for you, or insist that you resubmit your request with the proper spelling.
Okay… but I want suggestions on optimizing for misspellings anyway!
One way to get around the unprofessional appearance of misspelled words and phrases is to add a “common misspellings of this word are…” next to the correctly spelled words you are trying to optimize for. However, I believe that this technique tends to look spammy on most sites. An exception may be an ecommerce site including common misspellings of the product within the listing.
Another suggestion by SEOs has always been to take advantage of user generated content to generate misspellings for you. There are many ways you can accomplish this such as adding reviews to your site, or forums. However misspellings in forums are more likely to lead to the forum result and not your intended page, leaving reviews and comments as the main way to drive traffic to a specific page for misspelled words and phrases.
Another suggestion I have seen is to include misspellings within your meta keywords tag. As most SEOs (should) know, the meta keyword tag has been defunct for quite awhile and ignored by search engines. However, some claim that search engines such as Yahoo still use the meta keyword tag to help determine misspelled words on the page. At any rate, it is commonly agreed upon that Google as well as Bing completely ignore this tag. Now that Yahoo and Bing are getting into bed together, Yahoo will be showing Bing results within its search index. Since we agree that Bing ignores these, it is best not to waste your time and to concentrate on more important optimization techniques, like creating quality content.
What about paid search?
I still recommend bidding on misspelled keywords within your PPC campaigns. I feel this is a great technique for grabbing those customers who do type in your keywords incorrectly, while still being able to appear professional and helpful.
As far as I can tell, Google is making no changes to bidding on misspelled words and phrases within Adwords, and I honestly don’t see any reason why they would. This still helps the searcher, and clicks on these ads make Google money. See search example below for misspelled query of “Kindle”
How can I find common misspellings?
The most important advice I can give is to use your best judgment. There are tools which provide information on commonly mistyped words accounting for human error, but there is a big difference between typos and misspellings. I have personally found few tools which predict the actual misspelling of words or phrases. Microsoft’s Keyword Mutation Detection tool being the only one I know of, and quite useful.
Use your analytics program to research what keywords searchers are entering when they arrive at your site. This can provide insight on popular misspelled words by your users, and may also help you brainstorm some additional ones.
Typo Generators:
SEOChat Typo Generator
In conclusion:
You may still be able to get some traffic depending on your niche and how popular (or unpopular) that misspelling is. You should definitely perform research within your own niche to see how often you get full auto-corrections, partial corrections, or none. I feel that if the majority of your misspelled keywords are fully auto-corrected, you should not waste any more time on this technique. However, there may still be some niches which this doesn’t affect as much. If this is your case, and you can still appear professional while optimizing for these terms – have at it!
If you know of any additional free tools, optimization strategies or just want to let me know your thoughts, leave a comment below!
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