Thread: Misspellings of brand name

By accident I came across a well known brand that is very often misspelt in various ways in searches - according to the adwords tool the misspelt versions get 600,000 searches a month (using 'exact' not 'broad')!

The 'real' site usually still shows in first place for these searches but the sites in the results from position 2 onwards are rubbish (ie low ranking websites that have accidentally misspelt the word, old forum posts etc).

I guess I can't build sites around misspelt brand names so what if anything would you do to take advantage of this knowledge?

The industry is travel related.

Cheers

You could build a landing page and try to capture some of the traffic.

The problem with misspellings is that Google will put "Did you mean: ______" at the top of the results, which could take a lot of traffic away from your misspelling page that might be ranking well. I have also noticed that a lot of companies will not allow you to use misspellings of their brand or product name in your promotions. If you're not an affiliate, then I guess it doesn't matter.

I came across it because for competitor sites I quite often have a look at the 'Alexa keywords' for a quick glance at what keywords send traffic to the site - and for one site it showed that one of the misspellings was their main source of traffic.

So yes, they always show 'did you mean' but for some reason it seems a fair number of people ignore that and still go to the next result.

I'm not their affiliate, they don't use affiliates, preferring to rely on their strong brand name I guess!

(If you don't use it, that 'alexa keywords' is not a bad way of seeing very quickly where sites get their traffic from - it only takes 2 seconds if you have the alexa toolbar installed and it's surprising how often I pick up useful information. Just right click on the 'alexa score bar' and choose keywords)

Does Yahoo and Bing put "Did you mean: ______" at the top of the results?

That's close to 30% of search traffic.

I know certain sites that purposely misspell just to capture some of the traffic. Not only brand names but also on some of the top high paying keywords.

Does Yahoo and Bing put "Did you mean: ______" at the top of the results?

Interesting question. Both bing and yahoo do a good job with this and ignore all misspellings.

In quite small writing they say 'Results are included for [brandname]. Show just the results for [misspelt brandname].' So for the whole page of results they are assuming it is just spelt wrong, whereas google only assume that for the first one or two results, and then show the misspelt results.

So bing and yahoo would send no traffic at all.

Originally Posted by DickTracy

Interesting question. Both bing and yahoo do a good job with this and ignore all misspellings.

In quite small writing they say 'Results are included for [brandname]. Show just the results for [misspelt brandname].' So for the whole page of results they are assuming it is just spelt wrong, whereas google only assume that for the first one or two results, and then show the misspelt results.

So bing and yahoo would send no traffic at all.

So basically people relying on mispelled words for traffic are at the mercy of Google.

Looks like it, and i guess they could change to come in line with bing and yahoo any time, so I won't spend too much time chasing them. Think I'll get back to real work.

u may get traffic from typins

but chances are also there for TM dispute