Plurals, misspellings and your website

Ever try and go to a website and misspell it? You were expecting to find yourself looking at airline options, or office supplies or news but that is not where you find yourself. Instead, when the site loads you are looking at a page with a bunch of links directing you to competitor products to the company you were expecting. Disconcerting right? Why did that happen? If you look into it further you will likely find that you misspelled the URL.

As business owners, there isn’t much we can do about this, right? We can’t teach our customers to spell everything right 100% of the time, can we? No, we can’t. But we aren’t helpless either. One of my first pieces of advice for clients as they start to get serious about their web presence is to think of every available way a client can misspell your name (or make it plural) and buy all the URLs you can. If you want to hire me to create a fabulous web strategy for you and you type in www.springinsights.com, what will happen? You will be redirected to the Spring Insight website. If you want to stream the latest movies and you go to Netflicks.com, what will happen? You get redirected to Netflix.com. Planning to book a trip and go to travelacity.com, what will happen? You go to an affiliate page that directs you to competitor travel sites. Eeks.

Does buying extra domains cost a bit more? Yes. With most major domain registrars you are paying between $8.00 and $15.00 per year for each additional URL. For that price though you are buying the piece of mind that as you popularize your brand, someone isn’t out there set to ride on the misspellings of your coat tails.