SEO is a tricky business. Getting traffic is about knowing which words to optimize a site for and that includes the domain name. When doing a PPC campaign, it’s worth considering misspellings as part of a keyword campaign. But what about domain names?
Consider you are selling apple pies. You registered ‘applepies.com’ but your competitor came along and registered aplepies.com and appelpies.com and is doing very well off of your missed business. How can they do this?
Unregistered domain names are cheap and easy to get (if you’re not in Australia and don’t want a dot com dot au domain, but that may be a topic for another post). As they are cheap, its worth considering getting the most popular misspelled variations of your domain name just so your competitor won’t. If a potential customer reaches a misspelled domain name and it belongs to your competitor, you’ve just lost them forever.
The misspelled domain name industry is big. Try typing in any misspelling of Google and you won’t find any domains for sale. But what is the allure? As mentioned before, if Google is not the registered owner of the misspelled names, then somebody else gets all that traffic. What is probably more amusing is that a parked domain can be monetized with Adsense. This means Google still benefits in this case, but so does someone else. Imagine all the traffic that may end up on a misspelled Google domain by accident, and imagine the revenue that could be gained by the advertising links on that page. Think about it.
From the Adsense perspective alone, a good misspelled domain name may easily pay for itself, but instead, if it provides a product similar to it’s properly spelt competition, and that product is yours (or an affiliate product you promote), one or two sales here and there could add up to quite a tidy sum. And all just because you took the time to research misspellings. Take your time and do your research, because it may be a side revenue you could add to your business income stream.
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