Search What are you looking for?

Leverage Misspellings To Gain Traffic

Posted on May 24th, 2007
Written by Lee Odden
In this article

    Ready to elevate your B2B brand?

    TopRank Marketing drives results with content, influencer, SEO & social media marketing.

    Spell CheckOne of the most common problems with blog posts, email or just life in general is spelling. Sure, everything now has spell check built in, yet it doesn’t stop misspellings. Instead of fighting it, try using it to your advantage.

    Names are one of the common misspellings that are easy to do. Did Jordan Sparks win American Idol? No. Jordin Sparks did. However, thousands of people are searching for Jordan and it’s pretty easy to get additional traffic off the minor typo.

    Wikipedia also has a rather large list of commonly misspelled words.  I bet that a lot of people are searching on quite a few of them and getting frustrated because they can’t get any good results. This is where you could step in.

    I know what your thinking, you don’t want to create typos as it’ll make your site look bad. Yes, there is always that chance but you could always pre-date your posts so that they don’t show up on the front page of your blog. Set the date as last month so that your normal visitors don’t see them, but yet search engines will be able to find and index them.

    SEOBook actually has a tool to help you create typos. It’s hard to believe we need a tool for this, but it could come in handy.

    Another thing I’d consider is trying to run keyword popularity report to see what typos are most used in your industry. However, I’m unsure of a tool that would be best suited for such a niche phrase. From what I’ve found, it’s best to think off the top of your head or look at the employees or customers in your company. What are they having troubles spelling?

    Whether it’s intentional or not, creating posts with commonly misspelled words can help bring in additional traffic. Names are probably the easiest to misspell and easiest to get away with. But it’s those phrases like Carribbean or souveniers that might give you additional traffic on phrases that aren’t exactly spelled correctly.