Steering Misspelled Searches to Your Site

Quite an important part of understanding your audience is to find out if they actually reach your site. Depending on the brand or the product they’re searching for, they might be misspelling the keywords. If this happens, that increases the odds of them landing on other sites instead of yours. Such mistakes can cost your business a lot of money in lost traffic. 

Let’s get to the bottom of what those keywords are, and the wrong domains your potential shoppers might be landing on instead.

 

Let’s buy an iPhon! No, an iPhonr. I mean, iPhone!

At this point, it would’ve been understood with any of those misspellings that I meant Apple’s iconic iPhone. But would Google have understood that? 

Let’s pretend we’re Best Buy, wanting to get as many visits around the iPhone as possible. Obviously it’s pretty competitive: between other retailers and Apple itself, there’s going to be many brands vying for that visibility. There are key reports that can provide us how people are searching for the product, and then show us where they’re going afterwards. Let’s dive in.

 

The Voice of the Consumer: Search Intelligence

First Report: the Keyword Generator

Let’s start with what the people are searching for. A phenomenal report that provides us with the various ways in which people are searching for a product or brand is the Keyword Generator.  

1. Under Search Intelligence > Keyword Explorer, select Keyword Generator
2. Type in whichever product or brand you’re interested in. In this case, type in ‘iPhone.’

You’ll initially be presented with the Phrase Match searches. These will be various keywords in which people correctly spelled ‘iPhone.’ For this best practice, we want to click on Related Keywords, which casts a wider net around how people searched for the iPhone. This includes misspellings.

 

 

Go through the list and find the incorrect spellings. Take note of the keywords that have actually seen an uptick in search volume, as indicated by the Vol. Change column. These would be good to capture, as it means that those keywords are actually being searched for more. Select all the appropriate terms, put them into a Keyword List, and then analyze it.

 

 

The Second Report: (Keyword) Overview

The Keyword Generator provides us with the keywords, from which we are able to make a Keyword List for a more comprehensive analysis. Before we go to the SERP Players report, let’s check out the Overview. This is a great report to just give you an idea of various aspects of the keyword or keyword list, such as the SERP Composition, Organic Difficulty, Paid Competition, trends, and more.

 

 

The Third Report: SERP Players

Once you’ve done that (which isn’t necessary for this use case) let’s go to SERP Players. It’s where we can go to understand which sites are receiving traffic for the Keyword List (or individual keyword) we’re analyzing. 

1. Go to the SERP Players report under Keyword Explorer.
2. Input the Keyword List or individual keyword to analyze.
3. Check out the Total Search Volume and the Search Clicks.
4. On the trend report below, click on the 13M button – 13 months – to analyze a trend of the top sites getting traffic for the Keyword List. Look for any spikes over the time span to spot any seasonality, especially if there’s a repeat of a situation in the first and last months. Note: feel free to de-select any sites that are dominating the report to get a more accurate understanding of your brand and the direct competitors. In this use case, let’s remove Apple.
5. Scroll down a little more for the full report, providing a site by site breakdown of who’s getting traffic for the selected keywords. This will give you a clear perspective of the top brands you need to be aware of that are taking advantage of these misspellings and winning traffic for them.
6. Click on the All Keywords dropdown next to any site to see specifically which keywords they are utilizing. Take extra note of the terms that you see an increase in traffic for. In this example, note how T-Mobile sees an uptick in traffic for the keyword “iphon” without the e, or a massive spike in traffic for “ophone 15 pro.
7. Be sure to swap between organic and paid traffic for different sides of the story as well. Organic will show you who is optimizing for these terms and winning organic traffic, where paid will show you who is allocating budget on these misspellings, indicating that they really want to win any traffic that they can for the target product or brand. Note: in the Total Traffic Breakdown below, there is an Organic vs Paid Ratio column if you’re looking at Total Traffic.