Art Of Money

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I was a crappy speller. I hated it. Watching Akeelah and the Bee is my personal idea of torture. It’s bad enough that Starbucks is a sponsor…everyday I’m stuck with one of those 15 letter words on my coffee cup. But much to the ire of every 5th grade teacher in the world, there is profit in not knowing how to spell.
If you were a lawyer and someone calls you on the phone, a new potential customer let’s say, and asks for information on “bankrupcy”, would you hang up the phone because they didn’t pronounce the word correctly?

Given that a single “bankruptcy” client is probably worth several thousand dollars, I’m thinking that you, unlike your teacher, will let it go. From the SEOBook blog:

Misspellings probably occur in somewhere around 10% of search queries. Across the board misspelled terms are probably less than 10% as competitive as the correct spelled counterparts. Sure some people will opt to use the search engine spell correction tools, but many do not.

There is a rumor that Google penalizes sites with deliberate misspellings but apart from this entry on Matt Cutts’ blog, which seems to suggest that it is bad business more than a Google penalty thing, I couldn’t find any direct mention of this penalty. [note: they do mention penalties for having misspellings in domain names.]

Here’s a list of common misspellings [and the correct versions]. Don’t forget that this list is probably compiled from offline misspellings; students etc. I’m sure the list of online typos and misspellings would be MUCH larger.

There are many other tools available to generate typos and it’s my opinion if you’re doing active search engine marketing you can’t afford to leave a potential 10% of your market out of the “piture” ;).