4 Comments

What’s in a word?

May 12, 2006
by

The English language is by far my favorite. Okay, I’m biased, it’s the only one I know, but still… Its a damned fine language! However, every now and then everyone involved with a word seems to disagree on it’s meaning and / or it’s spelling.

I’m not talking about typosquatting. The word in question, today, is barbeque. Or, rather… barbecue.

Thanks to Wayne’s introduction to the Google Trends tool, we started to do some a/b comparisons (mostly for fun). In the process we found that Google Trends is a neat tool, but made a striking discovery – the mis-spelling of barbecue generally trends identically to it’s properly-spelled bretheren, and, according to Google Trends, is actually more often sought. GoogleFight (a favorite of mine), states that 35.3m sites have it right, and 15.5m have it wrong. But those 15 million sites are fighting for the same amount of traffic as the 35 million other ones.

This is just another reminder for those of you operating in the SEO / SEM space to really keep an eye on exactly what the consumer is doing. After polling everyone in the office and a few friends by email, I’ve established that I live in a barbeque world, even though our marketing messages are all focused on the c.

What’s in a single letter of a single word? It could be the other 50% of the market.

Filed under: Search Engine Marketing
  • Jonathan (Trust)

    "This is just another reminder for those of you operating in the SEO / SEM space to really keep an eye on exactly what the consumer is doing."

    As long as you don't overdo it. I've seen some sites that throw up every misspelling imaginable not realizing the SE's have a part of the algo devoted to just that.

  • http://blog.marketingprofs.com Ann Handley

    Right, Jonathan. And I've had authors submit articles to MarketingProfs with various words intentionally misspelled or (worse) spelled with creative variety in various spots throughout. Talk about an editor's nightmare!

  • http://www.affiliateranch.com Jamie

    As a Texan, I must say that the Q is correct :-)
    Or as we call it – BBQ.
    Of course, we only call it BBQ if it is sausage, brisket, or chicken. Everything else is just called "grilled".

    I couldn't resist!

  • http://epage.com Brad Waller

    We've know this for years. Back in 1994 we started using the actual and the popular spelling of VW because we knew many people misspelled the car name when looking for it. We still have a page with this here: http://epage.com/x/V.html, although more people seem to know how to spell it nowadays.