Grammar teachers would cringe on it. But savvy online businessmen see gold in it. Though not on the correct side of the Queen’s linguistic legacy, a misspelled keyword is an opportunity giver to a person who would like to get visibility in a politically correct linguistic scenario.

For one, misspelled keywords also have their weight in gold. They also have their own CPC, their Search volume and their ROI. Keyword tools will pick them up and assign a value to them, by hook or by crook. Not bad for a “reject”.

Many minds who have taken an SEO tip or two in their life may have utilized a misspelled keyword one way or another. They take into note two factors in utilizing misspelled keywords:

1) People have a tendency to mistype, and therefore enter in a misspelled term. Or in grander, more glorified term: the “human error” phenomenon.

2) Not all people are born Scripps Spelling Bee contenders. There will be people who may have, all their life, known a different spelling of a word. Thus, they type that spelling in.

The careful SEO planner is aware that these factors could actually lead people to results, in lieu of their error. And so misspelled keywords have created opportunities for sites—particularly those overshadowed by related sites which use similar keywords—to be visible for an otherwise, cringe-worthy spelled word.

Take for example, the keyword “dog food”. Entering it into KeywordSpy 3.0 would reveal these misspelled keywords:

KeywordSpy Misspelled Keyword results for the “dog food”

All misspellings apparently have a CPC value. And of course, Search Volume. Basing from this graph, we see that people had the tendency to misspell “dog food” as either “dog foo”, “dog fod” or doog food” more than often. On the other side of the spectrum are terms such as “dog food.”

Naturally, we would go for the ones searched more. And the more surprising thing with this is that even if they are misspelled, the searches done for these keywords were enough for them to merit values. The highest CPC belongs to “doog food” at $0.81, but then we see “dog foo”, which has $0.65 in CPC value, slightly has an edge in Profitable Ads, garnering a 3/60 figure, as opposed to doog food with 2 out of 60 ads triggered by the keyword are profitable.

The metric immediately next to it, Affiliate Ads, speaks for itself. Apparently these affiliates know that they can get their pitch across with a misspelling, and they end up accounting for most of the number of profitable ads for each keyword.

A good way to use misspelled keywords is to pick the lower CPC keyword and bet on it. In this case, most keywords are at $0.05, so does this mean that with this low cost, these are great keywords to use?

Wrong. Do not forget the Profitable Ads metric. In this case 12 of the keywords show 0/0, so ads won’t be generated, and your bidding will all be in vain. While if you bid on keyword “dog foo”, 3 ads will be seen for it. To put it simply, you must balance profitability via ads to costs per keyword to ensure that you performed well for a misspelled keyword.

The last important metric to note, which may not really be as important as prior ones, is Last Scan. We can see here that misspellings mostly appeared last June; whereas the more profitable misspellings occurred in September. This metric might have a more catalystic effect, as the recent appearance of the keyword would show that it was a popular misspelling, if there ever was one.

Also, remember with Google & Yahoo you’re more likely to get negative scores, to the dismay of the politically correct minds helming those terms.

The best way to utilize misspellings is to use them organically. One could rank high for them, considering the Search Volume for the terms. For example, using a misspelling in a blog post prominently would help it be seen atop listings for the word. And even if “dog foo” as a spelled word, is off, an idea is communicated once you get unlikely customers whose mistakes in spelling paid off. Making anchor texts out of “dog foo” would up the ante more on your SEO game.

So get the essence of business and start setting yourself apart from the crowd. Learn the value of misspelled keywords and end a lifetime of frustrated attempts to drive worthwhile traffic to your site.

Article submitted by Roi Abundabar, SEO Specialist

Tags: Misspelled Keywords, Misspellings, optimizing misspelled terms, Spelling Errors

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Keyword Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.