Question

Topic: E-Marketing

Dealing With Misspelling Of Company Name In Search Engines

Posted by Anonymous on 6/7/2004 at 11:51 AM ET 125 Points
The name of my client's company happens to include a word that can be spelled 2 ways (i.e. Mount Rainier Solutions - could also be Mt. Rainier Solutions - note this is not the real name of the company) but of course I can only use the correct spelling in the text on the web site. But this means if you Google their name with the misspelling, they don't show up - of course this is very frustrating. Can anyone think of a way to deal with this?

PS their domain name is shortened - like mrsolutions.com
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Peter (henna gaijin) on 6/7/2004 at 11:59 AM Accepted
    The company I work with (helpUhire) has this problem. helpUhire, helpyouhire, help-u-hire, help-you-hire, helphire, etc. are all possible spellings people would use.

    Steps to help prevent this that we use:
    - we bought all domain names we could for these mis-spellings, and point them back to the correct one. Unfortunately, we could only get one or two of the alternate spellings, as the other are in use already.
    - we use Google adwords (a pay per click service) to try to catch people who use the wrong spelling. We make sure the ad text for these words clearly includes the correct company name (as opposed to some sales saying).
    - I don't think Meta tags add all that much any more to your rankings, but we also include some incorrect spellings in our meta tags

    Added little trick for the alternate spellings is to link back and forth between these alternate names. This will ensure all names get parsed by the Google bots and also may help increase your ranking slightly through having added incoming links.
  • Posted by Blaine Wilkerson on 6/7/2004 at 6:12 PM Accepted
    Peter nailed it!

    That is the best way I know of. For one of my previous sites, I had 8 domain names forwarded to the site. I found that even if someone misspelled the name, the site would show up in the listings anyway. I accomplished this by placing the misspelled words in the Meta keywords. This way, the spiders still identified the real site.

    Good Luck!
  • Posted by Blaine Wilkerson on 6/7/2004 at 6:13 PM Member
    You may want to consider misspellings of competitor sites as well (OOPS...did I say that outloud?).

    Just be sure to check with the laws governing such a tactic.
  • Posted on 6/8/2004 at 5:05 AM Accepted
    Hi Betsy
    The first thing I would do is quantify the problem. Use something like WordTracker www.wordtracker.com to see just how many searches there are for each of the alternative spellings. Using the 80/20 rule you might then want optimise a few landing pages that correspond to main alternative spelling versions. You could do this in conjunction with or as an alternative to buying a whole list of URL domain names.

    I would suggest if one of the alternatives is only generating 1% of the searches it is probably not worth the effort. On the other hand your research might find alternative spellings that are popular with searchers that you had not considered.

    I hope this helps
    Regards
    Pat Divilly
    CEO MarketWare International
    www.marketware.biz
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