In analysing keywords for our client who runs a local agency (what is reclamebureau in dutch), we discovered something nice at first. According to the search engine keyword request database, we noticed that reclamebureau was asked for 95 times a day and has 440.000 competitors. Because in the Netherlands we have two different ways of spelling some words (old and modern style), we also looked at the modern spelling reclameburo and found out that this word had 140 search engine requests, and the beauty of it, 95% lesser competitors.

This was something we had to give a try. The ranking worked very well, because in one week we were ranked from nothing to  #7. What a hit....

But at the same time we looked up reclameburo (modern spelling), we noticed that Google asked us politely if we were looking for reclamebureau.. This is a wonderful feature if you accidentally made a typo. In our case, it is not a typo, but the truth is that reclamebureau is written more often especially, by the agencies (reclambureau) themselves.

Now, after a couple of weeks we felt that the "did you mean" advice from Google had a big effect on the searchers. The traffic coming from reclameburo is 25% lower then we get from reclamebureau, while this keyword is not even in the top 100!

Yes, we are a little bit disappointed and now we wondered if we learned out of this experience that as soon as there is a "did you mean___" on a non typo word, you can forget the traffic from your result because Google is stealing our traffic.

If you agree, we would like to know but if you don't, we'd really like to learn why you think not.