Typo Domains Worth Owning

Typed the way it sounds

People often hear a business name before they see it written: on the phone, from a friend, on the radio. When they type it, they type what they heard.

Some of those spellings lead nowhere. Some lead to a parked page full of ads, and some to another business entirely.

Email is worse. A message sent to a misspelled address either bounces, which at least tells the sender, or arrives with whoever owns that domain, which tells nobody.

A few extra domains fix most of this. The skill is picking the right few.

Where a typo sends people

If nobody owns the misspelled domain, the visitor gets an error and usually tries again or searches instead. That is the mild case.

If a domain investor owns it, the visitor sees a parked page of advertising. The ads are chosen from the words in the domain, so they are often for businesses like yours, and sometimes for your direct competitors.

If another business owns it, the visitor lands on their site, and may not notice for a while that it is not yours.

The variations worth considering

• The misspelling customers actually use, taken from real emails and payments.
• The other main ending, .ca if you have .com, or the reverse.
• With and without a hyphen, for names of two or more words.
• Singular and plural, where the name invites both.
• Numbers and words, such as 4 and four.
• Doubled or dropped letters in the hardest part of the name.

The first is worth more than all the others together. A misspelling you have seen in your own inbox is one people really make; the rest are guesses.

Finding the real misspellings

Look at how customers write your name when they write to you: in emails, on order forms, in e-Transfer messages and on cheques. The same mistakes repeat.

The person on the phones knows too. They hear which part of the name people stumble over, because they spell it out several times a day.

Search Console helps as well: its Search Analytics report lists the queries your site appeared for, misspelled versions of your name included. If you run AdWords, the search terms report shows the same from the paid side.

Check who owns them now

Type each candidate into a browser and see what comes up.

Then look it up with a WHOIS search, which shows who registered it, unless it is a .ca held by an individual or the owner pays to keep their details private.

An unregistered variation can usually be had for the price of an ordinary registration. A parked one may be for sale, often at a price far above its value to you.

If another business uses a variation in good faith, leave it alone and make your own spelling easier to find instead.

Pointing them at the real site

Each extra domain should send visitors to your real site with a permanent redirect, so the browser shows your real address once they arrive. Most registrars and hosts can set one up in minutes, at no cost beyond the registration.

Avoid the forwarding option some registrars call masking, which shows your site inside a frame under the misspelled address. Bookmarks, shared links and search engines all pick up the wrong address.

And never build a second copy of the site on a typo domain. One site with several doors is easier to keep current and clearer to search engines.

Catching the misdirected email

A domain you own can accept email even if no mailbox uses it. Set each typo domain to forward everything sent to it to your real inbox.

Quotes, orders and replies that would have vanished now arrive, and you can quietly correct the address when you reply. A spam filter on the forwarding keeps the junk down.

Test it before relying on it: send a message to an invented name at each typo domain and check that it lands in your inbox.

A worked example

A Korean grocery in a suburban strip mall takes orders by email for party platters of side dishes, kimbap and marinated meats. Its name is a Korean word, written in English letters on the sign and in the domain.

Customers spell it at least three ways. There is more than one accepted system for writing Korean in English letters, and the name has a vowel English has no single spelling for.

Some orders bounced back to customers, who then phoned, annoyed. One misspelling showed a parked page of ads, and the .ca of the correct spelling belonged to a reseller asking a large sum.

The owners went through a year of emails, e-Transfer notes and bounce messages customers had forwarded, and found two spellings that covered nearly every mistake.

They registered both, redirected them permanently to the real site and forwarded their email to the shop's inbox.

They did not buy the .ca from the reseller, or the dozen other variations an online tool suggested. All three domains now renew on the same date.

Not every typo

Every extra domain renews every year, and each needs current contact details. Registrars now email new registrants to confirm their address, and can suspend a domain whose details are never confirmed.

Twenty variations mean twenty renewals, twenty sets of details and twenty chances for one to lapse and be picked up by someone else.

So buy the few you have evidence for, at one registrar, in the business's name, with automatic renewal switched on.

The counter-case

A short name that is spelled the way it sounds may need no typo domains at all. Neither may a business whose customers mostly arrive from search results and links rather than by typing the address.

And no number of extra domains replaces a name people can spell. If the misspellings are endless, the better fix is spelling the address aloud on every call and printing it large.

For most businesses, though, two or three well-chosen variations, pointed home and forwarding their email, are cheap insurance.

Picking the right few

1. Collect the spellings customers really use.
2. Check what each one shows today.
3. Register the two or three likeliest.
4. Redirect each permanently to your site.
5. Forward their email to your inbox.
6. Put them all on one renewal date.
7. Confirm the registrar's verification email.

Step one decides whether the rest is money well spent. Registering guesses is what turns a sensible precaution into a drawer full of domains nobody needed.

How the main domain reads before anyone misspells it is covered in domain names that read badly without spaces.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.