Use PPC To Dominate Your Typo SEO Landscape
PPC advertising is not only great for generating sales and qualified traffic, it’s also the BEST possible keyword research tool available. While other keyword research tools offer a general “starter” set of keywords in most verticals, most only give general words and without demographic information. PPC data can be used for a whole lot more and is completely customized to your market. You’ve paid a premium for this data, now use it to your advantage…
With PPC, you can get detailed demographic data, hourly conversion data and of course what we are going to touch on here… typo conversion data.
PPC data comes with a huge bonus, conversion data. If you bid on typos, you can see what typos are actually converting. While the volume is usually a lot lower, over time, this conversion data can be very valuable in optimizing for organic search engine rankings.
Lets use the screenshot here as an example. If you were presented with this data, you can see that the search term “londkon hotel” over the past year and a half has had 314 conversions. With each conversion being valued at $80, that’s a little over $25000 in revenue for this “fictional” company.
If this “fictional” company was to organically optimize their organic rankings for for the search term “london hgotel” they would probably have seen zero results. If they had optimized for “londkon hotel” they would have seen some fantastic results. Assuming the organic number one position gets (a conservative) double the number one PPC result, that would be an additional $50,000 in revenue for this company. That’s just for one search term! More than likely, they wouldn’t have organically optimized for ANY typos.
Caveat: Bidding on typos in AdWords and Yahoo will usually result in a poor quality score for those keywords.
Now, if we take this data and write a press release, an article and a blog post all containing links to the company site with the anchor text “londkon hotel” that would probably be enough to rank their site for that search term seeing there is much less competition for it. Organic search engine optimisation without conversion data for each keyword is not where you want to be focusing your efforts. Most online companies engaged in active search engine marketing know that and focus on their core keywords. This leaves the competition in the typo landscape for that niche much easier to compete in.
So there’s another good reason why SEO and PPC compliment each other. So while you competitors are eating each other alive in the PPC Pirahna tank, take a step back and see how you can take advantage.
May 2nd, 2008 at 4:43 am
I like the tie in to quality score. What I find weird is that two goofs at a keyboard, essentially going for the same search, could have such radically different purchasing habits…
May 2nd, 2008 at 4:52 am
Thanks Gab, I should have actually gone into a bit more detail about that. If your quality score is in the poor “$1-$5″ range, you might be able to continue to bid on the terms. Ultimately, it will be worth your while.
Another thing I didn’t mention is that the CTR for the number one organic listing is usually less for a typo as a result of the “Did you mean…” link that Google displays.
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Dave - Fantastic article, thanks!
One question: Your mention that bidding on typos in Google and Yahoo usually will give you a low quality score for that keyword, however in the screenshot provided you are scoring “Great” for the “londkon hotel” example. Was your screenshot and example done before a tweak in the quality score algorithm? i.e., is it possible to still get a QS of “great” for typo keywords?
Thanks!
- Dave
May 5th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Hi Dave,
I was thinking exactly the same as Dave (above me). Is that a fictional quality score?
Cheers,
Michael.
May 6th, 2008 at 8:37 am
Great article Dave. Generating traffic needs to have a holistic approach, SEO , PPC, social media. To be true I’ve never really thought about capitalising on misspelled words in PPC.
Paul
May 6th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
This is a great way to squeeze some extra mileage out of a paid search campaign! You were right in that the “Did you mean” feature in Google really kills it for organic conversion on misspellings though.
Taking the impressions data from your paid search campaigns is THE best way to do keyword analysis! There are no accurate tools our there other than this. An impression = a search (considering that you are placed on the first page at all times for that term).
May 6th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Great Article!
One more thing to keep in mind is the match type. It appears that in this example one is using broad match which can trigger the keyword based on a wide variety of actual queries. There are some very interesting rules on broad match that can be found in the AdWords help center as to what triggers a particular keyword to fire VS another. Perhaps a more accurate way to measure this is using exact or phrase match. Either way, I really enjoyed the post!
May 8th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Thanks! In Pune real estate market, quite frequently, i come across “Did you mean…” . Till now, i used to just ignore it. Hence forth, I am going to put it to good use. You know i can start with my own name “Ravi Karandeekar” When one enters it in the search box, Google asks “Did you mean Ravi Karandikar?” I have only one blog post where i have spelled my cousin brother’s name as “Karandikar”! Hi! have i already started!! Thanks! I am very curious to find out how it works. Sure, i will keep you posted!
May 9th, 2008 at 8:46 am
I loved that article, Dave! It was very interesting and informative. I’ve always been interested in typos but never found good posts on that subject, thanks:)