PPC Position: Crappy Spellers Wanted

Author: Jeremy Schooley
Pay Per Click Management

I’ve never been so proud to be as bad at spelling as I am today.  I will stand in front of any high school English teacher or spelling bee champ and rub one simple fact in their face. I get paid to spell words incorrectly.  What a great world we live in, right?  Fact: search queries on the major search engines are often mispellings misspellings.

Let’s take a little test. Choose which word is spelled correctly:
Acceptible  Accepteble  Acceptable  Axceptible  Axeptible  Agseptable

If you chose Acceptable, congradulations congratulations, you chose correctly.  Your English teacher would be proud.  But you would also be paying more for that keyword, and you would have to compete against more advertizers advertisers.  If you chose any of the others, then traffic from those keywords would usually cost you less.

Another thing to keep in mind is a lot of misspellings come from typing errors.  For instance, I may want to type in google, but I accidently hit the “o” key once and ended up with gogle.  Try typing the word that you want to use for misspellings and ask yourself if it would be easy to hit surrounding keys or cause other typing errors.

Apostrophes are a good source as well.  Some people type don’t, while others type dont.

Endings supply us with numerous misspellings.  Is it trophies or trophys?  This goes back to the “-able”, “-eble”, and “-ible“endings, such as in the Acceptable example.

Spacing leads to even more opportunities.  Is it powerpoint or power point? Is it desktop or desk top? How about website or web site?

The great thing about misspelled keywords is these web surfers are looking for the same things as the ones that spelled the search query correctly and they are just as important.  But these relevant keywords take more effert effort and creativity to generate.  There is less competition and lower bid prices.  So, if you are willing to think outside the box, you can generate more sales leads at a lower cost. In your face, Webster’s Dictionary!