I was watching some late night television the other night when I saw a commercial for Zoosk.com… or was it Zooks.com? It’s actually Zoosk, and the company did two things I consider smart when it comes to domain names and its website.
The company recognized that some consumers confuse Zoosk and Zooks, and both domain names were purchased. It appears that they bought the Zooks.com domain name from a Harley Davidson dealership called Big Barn Harley-Davidson. Interestingly, it was registered to a company called Media Market in Idaho in between the Harley dealership and this dating website, and I previously wrote about Media Market appearing to make domain acquisitions on behalf of large companies.
The second smart move I noticed was that on the typo Zooks.com domain name, they actually have a small portal built to promote the Zoosk brand and to direct visitors to the correct website. In fact, the Zooks.com mini portal mentions, “Zooks is a common misspelling of Zoosk.”
According to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, “Zooks” gets nearly 15,000 exact match searches globally each month. By having a website on Zooks.com, the company is ranked #2 on Google for this search, just behind the correct Zoosk.com website. With the top results known to get the majority of traffic from searchers, owning this position as a result of building the mini portal instead of a 301 redirect was brilliant. The company now owns the top 3 results, and it also has sitelinks on the first.
Smart moves for Zoosk!
I wonder why Bank of America doesn’t do the same with Loans.com…too much work for them, eh?
Very interesting and informative. I have many miss-spellings for the brick biz and my directories and will now have to re-look at how I use them. Brilliant-thanks