The Power Of Ranking For Spelling Errors
Over the last few weeks I have noticed a significant number of visitors to this website searching for “plagirism.” The first thing that struck me was the spelling of the word. Plagirism should be spelt “plagiarism.”
Currently, 2.5% of this website’s search traffic comes form people searching for “plagirism.”
According to Google’s Adwords tool, plagirism has 4 400 searches per month. This may be just a tenth of what plagiarism gets, but plagirism (incorrect spelling) has 10 500 results in Google, while plagiarism (correct spelling) has 6 360 000. There are a lot of numbers to look at, but can you see which would be easier to penetrate the first page of search results for?
Here is the data summarised in a table:
| Search term |
Average monthly searches |
Number of Google results |
| Plagirism |
4 400 |
10 500 |
| Plagiarism |
49 500 |
6 360 000 |
I then decided to look at a list of commonly mispelled words to see how I could gain traffic by taking advantage of these. There are a lot of words that would be tricky to drop into your website, the likes of “consensus,” “embarass” and “foreward” would be difficult to find a place for.
Here are some good words you might want to look at, together with their monthly search volume and number of results in Google. You can also take a look at a list of commonly mispelled words in Wikipedia.
| Search term |
Average monthly searches |
Number of Google results |
| Accommodation |
3 350 000 |
109 000 000 |
| Acommodation |
9 900 |
442 000 |
| Acomodation |
6 600 |
206 000 |
| Search term |
Average monthly searches |
Number of Google results |
| Argument |
135 000 |
112 000 000 |
| Arguement |
33 100 |
1 510 000 |
| Search term |
Average monthly searches |
Number of Google results |
| Commitment |
60 500 |
89 600 000 |
| Comitment |
6 600 |
86 900 |
| Search term |
Average monthly searches |
Number of Google results |
| Dependent |
60 500 |
89 200 000 |
| Dependant (not actually a mispelling, but the least preferred version of the word) |
90 500 |
6 740 000 |
| Search term |
Average monthly searches |
Number of Google results |
| Embarassing |
60 500 |
13 700 000 |
| Embarasing |
12 100 |
900 000 |
| Embaressing |
12 100 |
74 300 |
| Embaresing |
1 300 |
48 200 |
| Search term |
Average monthly searches |
Number of Google results |
| Abandoned |
90 500 |
39 100 000 |
| Abandonned |
1 900 |
163 000 |
| Search term |
Average monthly searches |
Number of Google results |
| Judgement |
135 000 |
21 300 000 |
| Judgemant |
390 |
3 930 |
| Search term |
Average monthly searches |
Number of Google results |
| Licence (British spelling) |
1 220 000 |
71 700 000 |
| License (US spelling) |
823 000 |
423 000 000 |
| Lisence |
27 100 |
1 140 000 |
| Lisense |
14 800 |
196 000 |
| Search term |
Average monthly searches |
Number of Google results |
| Occasion |
201 000 |
189 000 000 |
| Ocassion |
74 000 |
529 000 |
| Occassion |
9 900 |
2 920 000 |
| Search term |
Average monthly searches |
Number of Google results |
| Guarantee |
201 000 |
236 000 000 |
| Garantee |
12 100 |
437 000 |
Some Caveats
As you probably know, whenever Google encounters a spelling error it will offer to redirect you to the correct spelling. Obviously this will take away some of your traffic and you need to bear this is mind, particularly when looking at the number of montly Google searches.
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