…..or Why You Should Optimize for Fat Fingers

People pay little attention to the spelling of words when it comes to search engines. At the back of their minds, they know cyberspace will probably do the correcting for them. In the online world though, this phenomenon is called fat fingers. It is the act of accidentally typing something wrong in a search engine query, which may consequently alter the results that you get.

You have probably experienced misspelling a word in the search engine box and hitting the enter key faster than you can recognize your mistake. You might be pleasantly surprised that your command still yielded a reasonable number of results. In fact, the site probably gave you some suggestions on the correct spelling of your search term. This means that the site is set up to handle fat finger problems. Its site owners have foreseen something like this happening.

However, this is not always reliable, as their usual basis is common spelling. For instance, it does not work with search words that use unconventional spellings or acronyms. The site will try to propose something else when you are looking for what you entered in the first place.

The problem with spelling
Spelling can be highly variable. For instance, the word “optimize” is spelled “optimise” in British English. This is also the case with “theater” (theatre), “carburetor” (carburettor), “honor” (honour), and “catalog” (catalogue).

While this can be readily addressed by ascertaining your target market, it is not easy if you want to cater to a wide demographic. Moreover, an online presence breaches geographical divides; your market can come from anywhere in the world.

Optimization with fat fingers in mind
Do not take this literally. The syndrome does not only pertain to people with chubby fingers, but that may have inspired the etymology. When you’re engaged in an online business, you cannot take this for granted.

For instance, if the name of your business or website is “Acquire America,” people who have seen your brand elsewhere or by word of mouth have the tendency to spell it “Aquire America.”

After all, “acquire” is one of the most commonly misspelled words in the English language.

If you don’t foresee this scenario, these people will have a lower chance of finding you online.

While a fat fingers problem is usually a case of carelessness, it also shows that a lot of users aren’t good spellers to begin with. Most depend on built-in spellcheckers to correct documents.

Finding the solution to fat fingers
There are a lot of software programs and tools that predict how some users may spell the keywords you enter, thereby increasing your chances of cornering those people before you competitors do.

It is always important to keep this in mind if you want to broaden the reach of your site.

Include these variant spellings in your web content.

Use them on meta tags, as anchor texts, in your business blog posts, and anywhere else possible in your site.

Taking into account fat fingers should be part of any search engine optimization plan.