Internet Marketing Tycoon

**vaseo** · 07-22-2004, 08:17 PM

Question. Are people who can correctly spell more or less likely to purchase online? For example, if someone finds your site by typing in the correctly spelled search phrase, are they more likely to stay and buy?

Do you have any data to support this?

From an SEO perspective, it is probably easier to market the misspelled phrases than the correctly spelled ones.

Just wondering

**jeter4982** · 07-23-2004, 01:01 PM

I would probably say people with speling (lol) mistakes are more likely to buy. People who take the time to type correctly are most likely more educated and cautious, and therefore, less likely to buy. This is not based on any research, just my personal thoughts.

**clasione** · 07-27-2004, 12:17 AM

very interesting hypothisis.... I wonder about that myself.....

I guess number of illiterites

compared to the number of basic keystroke errors also plays a roll in that equation...

**Martin Newton** · 08-06-2004, 06:24 AM

On the other hand, I tend to think that those who type-in the correctly-spelled keywords would be the most likely buyers.

Since they would be parting with their hard-earned dollars, they would probably think that those results that appear in the correctly-spelled keywords would be more "legit" than those in the misspelled words.

Of course, that is my own personal opinion. Hopefully someday there could be studies done so that more webmasters can be guided accordingly.

**carmack** · 08-18-2004, 11:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeter4982

I would probably say people with speling (lol) mistakes are more likely to buy. People who take the time to type correctly are most likely more educated and cautious, and therefore, less likely to buy. This is not based on any research, just my personal thoughts.

I don't know the answer to this either - but my conclusion would be the opposite from jeters. I would assume users who are more educated would have higher incomes and likely more money to spend.

My best advice would be to optimize your site for the correct spelling (as it should likely be searched for the most - but keyword research would back this up) and then do some PPC for the mispelling. This way you would get traffic from both correct and incorrect spellings. Plus, optimizing for the incorrect spelling would usually require you to use the mispelling on your site which I think would be a poor reflection on your professionalism.