Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant |

Not all of us have hit the household status we all wish our company names had. So if you aren’t a Sony or a WalMart, have you ever considered the fact that someone might be trying to find your company or product and either spelling it wrong or searching for a slight variation because the person who recommended you pronounced it incorrectly? And even the best SEO can’t rank your site number one for every single variation of your company name or brand. The last thing you want to do is lose those potential customers to competitors, when they were trying to find your site in the first place.

If you are lucky, Google might direct some of those misspellings to your site via their “Did you mean: ____” hint that it shows above the results when they believe there is a good chance that someone made a typo. But you have to be pretty well known to have Google do that for all your potential misspellings and typos of your company name. Keep reading…

When planning and researching your keywords to target for either pay per click advertising campaigns or on-page keyword focus within your content, most marketers don’t realize they are leaving a lot of potential keyword options on the table. And what’s more, these alternative keywords are often less expensive to purchase or less competitive to target in the search results for. Why is this? Because too many people take what keywords the various keyword tools give them to heart. There is a huge wealth of traffic to be gleaned by targeting variations of your top chosen keywords.

So what exactly do these “variations” refer to? It definitely goes far beyond the typical misspellings, which is what most people think of when considering alternative keywords. And while misspellings are a crucial part of your keyword variations, there are more areas to look at. Here is what they are and how you can use them to your advantage when creating keyword lists.

Keep reading…