I was doing some copywriting research this last week and ran across a site that is making a lot of mistakes with their use of trademark and registered trademark symbols, as well as using special characters in their brand name. They are also missing a great opportunity to take advantage of common search engine mistakes to help bring people to their site.
Here’s the rundown on a couple tips and tricks for any website copy that deals with copyrights or registered trademarks as well as for product or brand names that have special characters or that are hard to spell:
Let’s start with the trademark symbol. You have seen this on nearly every product brand, and it is always included in copywriting to ensure that legal ownership of the brand is established. While it is a good idea to include a trademark symbol in your copy, it is a terrible idea, and completely unnecessary to trademark every instance of the term. Over-use of the trademark symbol (™) or registered trademark symbol (®) in your copy will render it cumbersome and your readers will give up sooner than they might otherwise.
The other problem with using these symbols is that practically no one uses them in their search terms. By tacking these symbols to every use of your product name or brand you are limiting the relevancy between your posted content and the actual terms people are using to search for your site.
I recently found a web page containing only three paragraphs of copy with 20 trademark symbols scattered throughout. I found the page very difficult to read and quickly became distracted by all the clutter.
The solution is to trademark only the first instance of any product or brand name on any given page. By doing this you establish the legal ownership of the trademark and leave the successive instances free and clear for easy readability.
Another common problem I see is the use of special characters. You may have an umlaut or circumflex character with a line or dots over the top of a letter, or cedilla in your term with a small tail hanging down like in the word ‘façade’ (with a tail on the ‘c’). In these cases you may be tempted to incorporate the unique character for the sake of your brand, but be aware that almost no one will use it in their search, and the simple addition of a strange character can change the searchability of a word.
Like the solution for trademarks, use the special character in the first incidence of the word, and then use a more common spelling for all subsequent uses of the term.
Next lets quickly explore a brand-relate SEO tip for words that are hard to spell: When writing about a product or brand name, make a point to notice whether it is easy to misspell. Words don’t need to be hard to misspell, for instance some defy common practice by simply re-ordering letters that are more commonly used in a specific order.
Take for instance words that are spelled with ‘ea’ like ‘read’ or ‘instead’. A unique brand that uses the reverse of this (as in ‘AE’) may find that a lot of people are misspelling the term in their Google searches. This is an important consideration.
The solution: You may actually want to incorporate misspellings of your own terms to help capture additional search traffic, or to ensure that people who accidentally get it wrong are still able to find you. I don’t recommend misspelling your primary brands on your home page, but you may do well to miss one or two at the bottom of an occasional blog post.
It is true that in many cases the search engines will recognize a misspelling and direct traffic to the appropriate place, however you also need to consider that competitors may understand this tactic, also, and may be optimizing their copy to take advantage.
To find out if people are searching for misspellings of your brand, go to the Google Keywords Tool and do some research on misspellings. You will certainly be surprised at the number of searches that occur for misspelled words.
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Tags: blogging, copywriting, seo, Trademark, Writting
Do you have legal or press guidelines on the TM symbols. Our lawyers are insisting on using them for every time the word is on the page, I’m trying to find substantial proof that that’s not necessary.