Can you capitalize on others’ mistakes and be wildly successful with your Google Adwords campaign? Yes! But it’s not your competitors’ mistakes that you should always focus on. Let me explain…

Your prospects are not necessarily the best spellers in the world. In fact, the word “misspell” (mispell) is one of the most commonly misspelled words in the English language. There are many other commonly used words that are misspelled. Unfortunately, many of these words are typed into search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN every day. So why should you care? Because your competition usually doesn’t care!

Armed with this knowledge, you can dominate keywords in your market that no one else thought of bidding on. Since there is normally little competition for these keywords you can get them a lot cheaper than the correctly-spelled versions.

But let’s say you serve a clientele that is more sophisticated than most; perhaps your average customer has a college degree. Well, first I would like to ask you if you have read any college essay papers lately, but (seriously) even if you believe that those searching for you CAN spell, there are other reasons besides ignorance that many people misspell words:

-In their hurry, people leave out letters in a word.
-Letters get switched because of “fast fingers”.
-Ocassionally keys on keyboards get “stuck” and they add extra letters.
-People know how to spell common words, but don’t remember exact names of companies – especially if your business uses a surname in its title. (“Thompson” or “Thomson”?)

So how do you know which keywords people are misspelling to get to your business. First of all, start with good keyword research and make sure that you get the correctly spelled keywords first. Next, take a list of the most commonly used words in those keyword phrases and think about how people could misspell them.

There are several “typo” tools on the internet that can help. A free tool that you can use is located at http://www.selfseo.com/domain_typo_generator.php . Let’s do a real example. I will type in the word “attorney” and see what comes up:
-zttorney
-sttorney
-qttorney
-attornet
-attorndy

There were many more misspellings generated, but notice that all of these examples have nothing to do with the searcher not knowing how to spell; but in each case, the letter mistyped was a key in close proximity to the one intended.

So if you are going to dominate your competitors and take advantage of your prospects’ typos so that you can get inexpensive clicks, let’s go over some “Do’s and Dont’s.”

DO include variations of the most commonly misspelled keywords in your Adwords campaign. DO set up a SEPARATE ad group for these misspelled keywords so that you can better track their effectiveness. DO make sure that you have the misspelling of your own company name.

DON’T try to use the misspellings in your headlines or ad copy. That means you can’t use “dynamic” keyword insertion techniques for these particular keywords. Don’t even try. If it gets by Google the first time, rest assured that they will catch it, and you could end up being penalized big-time because Google definitely wants professional, correctly-spelled copy in its Adword campaigns.

Yes, it takes some extra work, but the payoff can be hugely successful. You not only have to know what you should do correctly, but more importantly, what your competition is NOT doing correctly in order to run successful PPC Campaign Management.