Hopefully the misspellings in my title caught “yer” eye!
As a webmaster, you probably rely on people searching for your products or services to find your site. Yahoo reports that 10% to 15% of search terms they receive are misspelled, and MSN recently began offering search results with correctly spelled search terms if they think the original search term was misspelled. Until search engines are smart enough to search based on voice commands (…is this possible yet?), people must manually type a term into a search engine. So, how can you leverage the fact that people are often terrible spellers?
Sometimes I visit the Dogpile SearchSpy to “eavesdrop” on what people are searching for in real time. Dogpile compiles searches from Google, Yahoo, Live Search (MSN) and Ask. A recent unscientific sampleing (whoops!) sampling of the misspellings in the unfiltered search list indicated that about one in 25 searches were misspelled. I went on a search myself, looking for up-to-date, total numbers of how many searches were performed on a daily basis. This information is hard to come by, but I did find an April 2006 article by Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch that calculated the number of searches from Google, Yahoo, Live Search (MSN) and Ask as 192 million per day, which works out to 2,222 per second [(192,000,000/24)/(60*60)].
At 4 misspelled searches per 100, and 2,222 total searches per second, that’s 22 hundreds per second and 4 per hundred, which is 88 misspelled searches per second. Times 60 seconds in a minute, times 60 minutes in an hour, times 24 hours in a day…that’s a staggering 7,603,200 misspelled searches per day!
While lurking on Dogpile I saw misspellings for ‘freee,’ ’satalite,’ ‘annaul’ (annual), ‘prision’ (prison), and this one: ‘wich us presadent made thanksgiving a national holaday.’ Now, should that count as one misspelling or three?
To put this into a real-world, ecommerce context, I turned to my trusty Digital Point keyword suggestion tool and looked up ’socer’ rather than ’soccer.’ I found 120 searches for various terms related to ’socer’ using the Wordtracker information.
I’ll avoid making a joke about the intelligence of athletes here ;), and just go on to say that if I sold soccer related items, I’d be capitalizing on that by using this common misspelling in my page titles, keywords tags and possibly some Description meta tags if I could work some misspellings into the text that I wouldn’t mind appearing in the text box on the results page.
You definitely don’t want to pepper your site with gross misspellings in an effort to gather that traffic; you’ll lose credibility and look as silly as those Flat Earth people and no one will want to buy anything from you! But there is room for optimization of one or two commonly misspelled terms if they relate directly to a product you sell.
Respected Googler Matt Cutts has gone on-the-record to say that misspellings are bad SEO practice. Most of the time I don’t doubt Matt’s sage advice, but this time, I’m disinclined to go along, in light of the aforementioned staggering number of misspelled search terms. It just makes sense to optimize for easily misspelled competitive search terms, such as “flamenco, flamanco, flemenco, flimenco, etc” if you sell dancing shoes.
If you are a good speller yourself, it can be tricky to determine what easily misspelled words you could capitalize on. Use this free Typo Generator from SEO Book to type in a word and select typos for skipped letters, doubled letters, reversed letters, skipped spaces, missed keys and inserted keys.
Goof Luck! I mean, Good Luck!
Posted on October 30th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Search
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