SEO Tip of the Week: Target a Typo of a Common Keyword and Increase Search Traffic by 30%

You can easily use the typos of common words to increase your search traffic by 30%.

Typo Targeting SEO Strategy

Just in case you didnt make it into my devilishly devious white hat SEO trickery session, here is one of the hidden gems you can start taking advantage of today. Not ranking for your prime key terms? Target the typo. You can easily use the typos of common words to increase your search traffic by 30%.

For example, on Monday of last week, we had a training session with U-Haul corporate in Phoenix. They have been targeting their prime key term, U-Haul for some years.

U-Haul gets approximately 4,000 searches per day according to KeywordDiscovery. By simply removing the hyphen in the name, they could increase their daily searches to over 60,000. While this is an instance where targeting the typo would be more valuable than targeting the keyword, look at these numbers:

Phoenix, 117,365 searches

Pheonix 12,878 searches

Clearly, in this case, targeting the typo has a great deal of value. Lets say tat you target the typo from time to time and eventually rank #1 in Google for that term, you will see 30% of that traffic which translates to 3,867 visits per day. Not bad, huh?

Read also: What percentage of total search does each position on the first page of Google actually get?

What is the value of targeting a typo?

You can rank for that term far easier than you can rank for the correct spelling

How can you find common misspellings of words?

Dont waste your time thinking up common typos or misspellings of words, use a tool to do it for you.

Tool: The Typo Trap

Better Tool: Syndic8 Black Hat Forum Typo Tool

Be sure to evaluate the typo

Make sure the typo you are targeting has some search value by checking it against common keyword research tools.

Tool: KeywordDiscovery

What is the best way to target the typo?

1. If you use post slugs, that is the best place to include your typo target since very few people will ever read the actual url and you dont have to leave typos in your post title or pos body.

2. If you dont have post slugs, the next best place is in the post body itself. I generally dont recommend typos in the post title, but if you use auto healing urls, you could go in and change the typo later without changing the post url.

What is a Post Slug?

A word or two describing an entry, for use in permalinks (replaces the %posttitle% field therein), especially useful if titles tend to be long or they change frequently. Essentially, this a way to rewrite your post url to include more keywords.

Long tail, short tail and coat tail searches
SEO Autopsy: see your site like Google does
Canonicalization: is it killing your website?
The differences between search engines
Stop Word List

http://www.rsspieces.com/00207E

http://www.rsspieces.com/target-a-typo-of-a-common-keyword-and-increase-search-traffic-by-30

Posted on February 26, 2008 09:09:17

Comment from: Jay Thompson [Visitor]

· http://www.phoenixrealestateguy.com

I didn't intentionally target the Phoenix misspelling in your example. But I can assure you that my poor typing skills making that exact mistake have NOT been corrected. People search that term ALL the time.

Similar (yet different) is the reason I secured ThompsonsReality.com for our main site, ThompsonsRealty.com. I've had *agents* misspell "realty". No SEO benefit to that, but it helps when communicating the URL via voice.

Permalink February 26, 2008 14:10:43

Comment from: Joseph Bridges [Visitor]

· http://www.InternetRealEstateSuccess.com

Misspellings are a great place to start and not just in your SEO work. I always recommend that people use misspellings as part of their advertising with Google Adwords. Most advertisers fail to take the time to put the common misspellings as part of their keywords they are advertising on.

Misspellings are great and adding them to an SEO strategy where people won't see your misspellings is a great way to generate great traffic to convert to leads. Anytime you can go the extra mile that your competition is unwilling or too lazy to do is wise advice.

If anyone wants to see the post I wrote on how to use misspellings in their Google Adwords you can find it at our blog under Google Adwords:

(Mary if you want to remove the link to the post I understand I just thought it might be helpful)

http://internetrealestatesuccess.com/2008/01/16/5-reasons-to-use-misspelled-words-in-your-ads/

Permalink February 27, 2008 11:12:52

Comment from: Johan [Visitor]

· http://helpmetoblog.com

Hi This is a great post. One question: Do you then include the miss spelled word in your post title etc? This creates a *little* problem for those purists out there who tend to want to correct you on your ability to spell ;-) Regards Johan

Permalink February 27, 2008 12:40:41

Comment from: Mary Pope-Handy [Visitor]

· http://www.LiveInLosGatos.com

This is a great idea. Along the same lines, I think it's smart for agents to buy the domains and connected emails that are misspellings of their name or website - especially if it's complicated, as is my hyphenated name. (I have bought every variation of my name, with and without the hyphen, to insure that I get all my intended email - and all of them are redirected toward the "correct" spelling.)

Permalink February 27, 2008 19:57:52

Comment from: Guest [Visitor]

· http://www.rsspieces.com

John/Johan

Hail to the purists! Put the misspelling in the post slug that way it only shows up int he url for Google.

Mary,

I agree- misspelled domains helps with communication and helps to protect your rep so a sleazy competitor can't snap it up- we ought to have done that with our domain as we did have a sleazy competitor purchase misspellings of our domain and point them to his site.

Permalink February 27, 2008 20:34:13

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