Last week I went to lunch with a friend to a nice Mexican restaurant in San Francisco called Mercedes Restaurant. It was easy to find on Google and had great reviews. But I noticed that the word Mercedes in the title of the homepage was regular type face in Google search result pages instead of being bold. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was actually misspelled as Mercdes. After looking at the source of their website, I found an H1 tag on the page which was misspelled the same way as the title. As a side note, the H1 tag is for some reason not visible on the page.

Both the title and the H1 tag are important elements of SEO and creating brand awareness. To make things worse, they have both of these tags used globally for each page on the website. Google and other search engines help them by assuming (based on Click Through Rate, I guess) that their website is what people are looking for when they search for mercedes restaurant San Francisco.

This was one of the several examples where website owners don’t pay attention to detail on the copy for the website and are solely dependent on the search engines to find a connection between the misspelled keywords and the actual website.

If you have a small website with 10-20 pages, you should follow these steps:

1. Run an automated spell checker like this on your website.
2. Tool will help you, but you will have to manually go through the results.
3. Specifically check Title and Meta Description (they are visible on viewing the source of the page).
4. Go to the main search engines and search for your brand name/main keyword and make sure that the results show your website as you intend to.

No related posts.