When you register a domain name for your company's website, you're typically offered an array of alternatives to augment the usual .com suffix. "Many businesses register .org, .biz, .gov," notes Janine Popick at the VerticalResponse blog, "and they may even register their domains in other countries like Great Britain (.co.uk) or Argentina (.com.ar)."

Among the reasons for this policy is the chance that customers guessing at your URL might type something other than .com—a real possibility, especially for companies with an international audience. But this isn't the only mistake visitors might make, and for that reason, asks Popick, "have you thought about registering the misspellings of your domain?"

Start by researching how customers tend to misspell your company's name. If the first word ends in an L and the second word begins with an L—for instance—you might discover the common error of typing just one L when the words are forced together in a space-less URL.

Popick used the keyword tool from Google AdWords to determine how many people tried to access her own site with the misspelled URL verticleresponse.com. "To my surprise," she notes, "I saw there were over 700 visits to this page in a month, a clear opportunity for us to redirect these visitors to our home page."

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