In Part 1 of this series, we looked at researching and analyzing keywords that may be commonly misspelled. Once you’ve identified misspelled words and determined those worth optimizing, you want to figure out how to get those misspelled terms onto your website.
“Should I put misspelled words on my website?”
Well, yes, sort of.
We’re not suggesting you put misspelled words into headers, URLs, title tags or on-page content because that may cost you some credibility points with clients and prospects. We don’t want you to compromise your reputation or diminish conversions for the sake of a high performing misspelled term. Here are three suggestions to capture popular misspelled keywords on your site:
- Use “commonly or often misspelled as…” – Incorporate the misspelled term into your copy by prefacing it with “often misspelled as…” You might even create a special page or section of your site dedicated to common misspellings or misconceptions related to your business or industry. In other words, you can create content around the misspellings.
- Place misspelled keywords in “hidden” places – Consider using the misspelled terms in non-prominent places such as image alt tags and meta data descriptions where users aren’t likely to see them.
- Target the misspellings with microsites – If you find yourself with really high performing misspelled terms, you might consider building a special site around them. If you can manage to register an exact match for the domain name, you’ll see a huge advantage in your rankings. Additionally, you should also see some traffic when people misspell the URL in their address bar.
At Michael Mackenzie Communications, we’ve had some experience with leveraging misspelled keywords for clients. For example, our client in the bail bonds industry, is often found online using the key term, “bails bonds.”
The high volume of searches for bails bonds has led us to incorporate the term into video content we’re producing about industry myths and misconceptions. We have also used the term in alt tags and are currently looking into additional ways to capitalize on this very common search term misspelling.