Pawel Szulencki Search Engine Optimization/Marketing blog.
How to use the popularity of online tools to get more visitors to your website
3Feb2009 Filed under: Google Author: Pawel Szulencki
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There are many different ways of generating traffic to your website: link building, email marketing, paid advertising, organic seo and others. But some solutions to generate traffic do not fit to any of the categories i mentioned above.
One of such solutions is stealing directing traffic from misspelled domain names to your own domain name. Lets assume that you want to go to the new Google tool that allows you to translate websites called Google Translate tool. The tool is located on Google’s sub domain http://translate.google.com/ But what if you make a mistake and instead of http://translate.google.com/ you will write http://www.google.translate.com. It seems like a very small mistake, but in the end you will land on a totally different website, not Google Translate tool.
http://www.google.translate.com leads you to a sub domain of www.translate.com website which is also a translation service website not affiliated with Google. It redirects than users from that sub domain to the main domain. That way those users that mistype the correct Google Tool will land up on a different website.
Since Google Tool is very popular and free service many users remember the name “Google Translate” tool and type in the address the same way: google.translate.com not expecting to land on a different website. Translate.com website only gets a free traffic out of that situation. The traffic is somehow targeted as those are people looking for translation services. Only they know how many users do they get for free and how many users convert into their customers. There are even several links to the www.google.translate.com website as people tend to mistake that url with the real Google Translate Tool at www.translate.google.com
That is just an example of how websites can benefit from popularity of online tools and services that have similar names. The only thing in my opinion Translate.com could do more in order to keep the incoming traffic to their website is to set up a special landing page for the users that mistype Google’s Translator tool and end up on their website. They could give those users special benefits, discounts, welcome them in a different way, tell them that they end up on their website due to mistyped error, but they should not turn away, but rather stay on their website. They should try to convince people that their service are better than Google’s. That way they would generate much more sales from the people that come to their website by accident.
If you have a website that has a similar name to some popular online tool or service you may also try to get bonuses from that situation. As i said in the beginning, this solution does not fall into the “normal” processes and you need to figure that out by yourself.
Sphere: Related Content- Tags: google translate
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About this blog
Pawel Szulencki is a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Marketing certified specialist who is interested in organic SEO, paid campaigns (PPC) and Social Media Marketing channels. (Read more)
Aed Sys (1 comments.)
February 3rd, 2009 at 2:11 pm
very useful information i am really impressed.
i-trepreneur.com (1 comments.)
February 3rd, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Yep, this is not a particularly new, but a very useful technique. You may also want to try and redirect traffic from such domains to your own or resell this traffic (if it is retargeted).
Pawel Szulencki (171 comments.)
February 3rd, 2009 at 5:32 pm
@i-trepreneur.com: Yeah, i guess it is possible to sell that traffic to the original website as this traffic is targeted. Anyway, it is good to know about that technique.
Vintage Engagement Rings (1 comments.)
February 3rd, 2009 at 6:51 pm
I’ve always wondered about the usefulness of this technique. I would think that the conversion rate for them staying on the page is very low because they knew what they were looking for, but didn’t find it.
Then again, if your content is interesting and compelling enough then there probably is a good chance that they might stay.
I can see this working really well for affiliate sites, because they would be selling the same thing as the original
Austin Graffiti (1 comments.)
February 5th, 2009 at 1:44 am
Unfortunately, some of us are unable to take advantage of typos because our domains are not common nouns like translate.
Typo squatting is illegal, but what’s the status of creative subdomain usage?
Austin Graffitis last blog post..Mega SMUT throw-up
Pawel Szulencki (171 comments.)
February 5th, 2009 at 7:48 am
@Austin Graffiti: Its true, only some of us are able to get advantages of typo mistakes. I do not know exactly the status of subdomain usage laws, but i’d love to hear it if anyone knows.