Mis-spellings - The Real Long Tail Of Search

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

When I was a child, I won my elementary school’s spelling contest. I know, I know, you’re really floored by that accomplishment The point is, in the SEO business, this award doesn’t mean much, because SEOs need to go after all of the keywords out there. These are the keywords that are typed in by people, and let’s face it, people mis-spell many words! Many of them will also ignore the search engine’s suggest spelling, so this people will become visitors.

This is the long tail of search, and it’s not glamorous. But it is long.

Many mis-spellings will have less than 100,000 documents competing. This is a sweet spot for optimizers (good ones, anyway). You should be able to easily craft a winning page for any mis-spelling you target, and it won’t take you a ton of time, and your competition should be weak. You’ll end up competing with other Heroes of The Long Tail, most notably scrapers.

How much effort should it take to land a mis-spelled word?

Not much. My own efforts show if I actually make a page that targets a mis-spelling, I can generally land it in the top 10 on it’s debut. With a slight bit of tweaking, and maybe one link, a number one ranking in Google can come quite easily. Google has turned their relavancy know back up, so it should come as no surprise that you can rank properly keyed pages pretty quickly. This will depend on the trust of the domain, etc, but it still should be relatively easy.

You probably won’t need a configured landing page for each mis-spelling. Just sprinkling a few throughout the page should be enough. But if you find yourself struggling, go ahead and take the extra minutes to make the page. It will pay you for months (maybe years) to come.

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to the Sootle RSS feed!.