Should you try to rank for misspelled keywords?

[HamiltonIsland]

Hi there,

2 part question:

1. Is it best practice to try to rank for misspelled keywords that bring in lots of traffic or should you instead just try to rank for the correct spelling of that keyword and hope that you rank better on the misspelling as an indirect result?

E.G. The misspelled keyword "Hamilton island accomodation" is a common misspelling that brings in traffic but we have an "F" rank for that term (obviously because we spell accommodation correctly on our site). We don't want to misspell anything but are there techniques to rank better for misspellings that won't hurt content quality?

2. The On-Page Optimization tool says that our website doesn't rank in the top 50 on Google Aus for "Accomodation Hamilton Island" or "Hamilton Island Accomodation" but when i do a manual search, we actually are the first result. Is this an error with the On-Page optimization tool?

Thanks!

[Dekoda_Jones]

Hey there,

Google works hard to recognise misspellings and place the most relevant website at the top of the search results.  So the first thing I would look at is where you are actually ranking for those misspellings and secondly, how many searches are there for those terms each month?

To most accurately achieve this, I would run an Adwords campaign using exact match on all the possible misspelling combination, setting an unlimited budget and then measuring the amount of impressions generated.  Make sure it is exact match or you will be left thinking you've struck gold, when in fact you have erroneous data.

If you do really want to optimise for this term and you are not coming up first for that term, then I would look below the onpage factors.  As I said, Google's pretty dang good at picking up typos, so instead I would focus on improving your link profile so you are an authority on the area.  Also creating more deep content and internally linking through to that one central page will help to channel the link juice through to that key page.

There are some that will argue that misspellings on your website look terrible and devalue the brand.  To avoid this I recommend focusing on the linking side of things and only onpage typo's if you need to.  If you do go down this path, then create a new page and link it in through the sitemap so that the vast majority of your customers are not exposed to the typos and put off your service.

2.) Check the settings for the on-page optimiser and the most recent cache date, both of these could be throwing off your results.  Also, make sure you have your computer set to private browsing.  One thing Google and Google + are doing now is looking at your history and automatically increasing the rankings of sites you visit regularly.

OK, that's enough of an epic answer for me.  Hope you like it

Josh

[AlanMosley]

good answer josh.

i would like to add, for bing you should add miss spellings to the keyword tag. Yes Bing uses the keyword tag.

[TheARKlady]

One of the things to consider is not only adding the misspellings to the meta tags but also using them in the URLs.

I've had to get creative on something similar...not so much about misspellings but for targeting terms that are getting searched and have low competition but that my clients don't like.

In the end, the URLs and tags can remain the same with the wrong spelling but the client and searchers see the correct terms.

I am still testing on this--and as you know, testing is about the only thing that will tell you if it works.

Wondering if creating the misspelled version of the page can be created and later changed to a 301 redirect to the right spelling? Anyone have feedback on this?