Whether you are achieving top placements across the engines for all your main keywords, or are having trouble cracking the top 30, tapping into traffic generated by misspellings can sometimes be a valuable addition to your search engine marketing and paid placement campaigns.
By focusing on your main keywords, it is easy to forget that there may be some very common, and in some cases highly searched misspellings for your keywords. For example, if you manage a small hotel, ‘accommodations’ would obviously be a main keyword for you to target. A quick check on overture shows ‘accommodation’ with 86,499 searches for October, which would defiantly be a prime target, but take note of the common misspelling, ‘accomodation.’ If 5% enter this incorrectly, that’s more than 4,300 searches a month on overture alone! Let’s say just two percent of these result in a click to your site, that’s nearly 100 visitors. That may not sound like a lot, but its still 100 additional visitors that weren’t there before. Keep in mind not only I am pulling the 5% and 1% numbers out of the air, this would only account for one search engine. The actual numbers could be much higher!
You don’t want a highly searched misspelling to pass you by. In many cases targeting the misspelling of a keyword, although searched less frequently, can direct more traffic to your site. Not only is it typically easier to achieve placements on misspellings, but if you are in the top 10 surrounded by a bunch of irrelevant results, chances are you will draw the majority of clicks on the search of that misspelling.