While most of us hate to admit it, we all make spelling mistakes, if we didn’t we wouldn’t have the need for spell-check. Spelling mistakes have been used for years by marketers, taking advantage of our moments of weakness. The most common use is buying domains which are similar to well known domains with small variations such as a letter missing, letters in the wrong order or a letter added. These domains are usually full of ads and some will even offer you a redirect to the actual site you were searching for, acting as an affiliate to that site.

On the advertising front advertisers purchase spelling mistake keywords either for their own brand or more commonly a competitors, thus having their ads show up in search results. An article by the BBC claims that a single spelling mistake can cut online revenues for a business by half.

If you don’t understand the power of spelling mistakes, and how they are used, it have more impact on your businesses than you, and certainly others, would think.

But, what if their was more to it, what if marketers could not only understand how spelling mistakes impact their business, but also predict spelling mistakes for large events or trending topics.

In August of 2014, more than eight 800,000 users searching for ALS due to the ice bucket challenge, ended up on the search results page for ASL (American Sign Language).

The real question is: what can we learn from this? Such a simple mistake right, and surely most of these users understood their error, and conducted an immediate second search for ALS.

The fact is, if used correctly, and in the right combination, savvy businesses and marketers could leverage these mistakes for free branding opportunities. Predicting and understanding what your users search for, and how your business is discovered could result in a huge opportunity for your business, and must be a cohesive part of your marketing efforts.

Article Written By: Daniel Rosenfeld