How Misspelled Words Affect Your SEO

You may say that SEO Visibitly is just plain wrong! I know the very idea would upset Mrs Garton, my old English teacher, but sometimes using misspellings could be the right thing to do.

To explain why optimizing for a misspelling can help increase your website's traffic we need to take a look at our own search habits. I type fairly quickly, but not very accuratley or should that be accurately, so mistakes, like that one, often occur. When I’m using a Word processor or my blog account spellcheck takes care of those errors for me. With the search engines there’s no spellcheck, you get exactly what you typed. I guess the same is true for a lot of people searching for information. So, quite often, a phrase like SEO Visibility will be transformed into SEO Visibitly.

Keyword Research I did some research using Wordtracker Competition Search Automation and KRA and the results are worthy of note. I found that the phrase SEO Visibility is searched for approximately 167 times per day across all the major search engines.

SEO Visibitly, the misspelled version, is searched for slightly less with around 142 searches, but when we look at the competition for the phrases there’s a considerable difference. Spelled correctly SEO Visibility has 600 competing pages, the misspelled version SEO Visibitly has only 7.

A search using googles’ operator intitle: gives us a more accurate estimate of pages that have actually been optimized to for a particular phrase and so weeds out the “accidental hits”. The search for intitle:”seo visibility” returns 219 competing pages, not a massive level of competition, but take a look at intitle:”seo visibility” and there are still only 7 pages to compete with. As long as you have SEO Visibitly in the title tag you can’t fail to be on the all important first page of the google search results. The only question is would you prefer to compete with 219 sites or 7 for about the same amount of traffic, I know what I'd prefer!

But what about the Mrs Garton factor? Or “can you be a trustworthy source of information if you don’t know how to spell?” This question touches on the issue of trust, which is especially important for anyone trying to sell a product or service online. The perceived risk is higher if buyers have no personal contact with sellers. So this is a genuine problem that needs to be addressed whenever you use misspellings to bring in traffic.

How you do that will depend on the structure and aims of your articles or the copy on your webpages. My own chosen method is to admit my mistake early and explain that I use misspellings to ensure that everyone can find my site. Instead of being a negative, misspellings are a kind of additional service. I don’t have any hard data, but I’m pretty sure a misspelling in the title tag drives off a few really pedantic searchers.

Conclusion In the end, Search Engine Optimization is all about generating targeted traffic. To that we need to be giving people what they’re they’re looking for. By using misspelling we’re aiming to give people what they want and that’s got to be a good idea in any business.

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