29 replies to this topic

[flasht75]

[Moved to the Keyword Research category.]

okay, i'm a newbie...i know my company suggests using singular forms of keywords, but some search engines (such as google) reduce the competition tenfold if you use the plural form. what do you recommend?
thanks in advance
tanya

Edited by Jill, 15 October 2003 - 07:38 AM.

[bwelford]

As you say some search engines will serve you up listings for both the singular and plural versions, whichever you search for. However even for them, I imagine if the searcher looked for the plural version, then webpages with the plural form would rank higher than versions with the singular form.

For Google, they only serve up webpages that have exactly what you searched for, either singular or plural.

So in either case, I believe you should try and guess whether most searches are done for the singular or plural versions. Unfortunately, I don't believe you can get much help in deciding which is the most popular search, the singular or the plural.

[flasht75]

thank you for your quick response...much appreciated.

[Jill]

Welcome, flasht75!

Why are you limiting yourself to either plural or singlular? You should always use both forms (in your copy) if both forms are getting searched on in the engines.

Jill

[flasht75]

yes, only our company limits the clients to 20 keywords. i do sometimes suggest using both forms of the word. this forum is very helpful by the way and i can't wait to learn more (i've only been doing keyword analysis for a month now).

[flasht75]

p.s., any advice about hard nosed clients...my company absolutely advises against general keywords (since their promotion relies heavily on faster placement) but some clients are insistent upon it. i know the logic, i'm just not sure how to present it most effectively. while perusing the boards i've seen some recommendations. any would be appreciated.

[Scottie]

It's not that you can't optimize for general keywords, it's more an issue of being more effective when you optimize for those keywords as part of a targeted keyphrase.

If your client wants you to optimize for "calculators", you can recommend that they optimize for "scientific calculators" and "solar calculators" or "buy calculators online". All of those phrases will be optimized for calculators, but also for a specific phrase that is likely to be searched for.

You aren't excluding your general keywords... just adding to them with additional words that will bring more targeted traffic along with the general ones.

[flasht75]

Hi Scottie,
I couldn't agree more. But, I still have clients who would rather use the keyword 'gifts' rather than 'birthstone gifts' or something of the like, you know? It is just difficult to get them to take our recommendations a LOT of the time; for instance, they imagine users only typing in one keyword. If someone types in 'gifts' and their keyword is 'birthstone gifts' wouldn't they still have a chance of placing (depending on how the user searched of course)?

[flasht75]

by the way i did recently have a client who sells calculators recommend just using 'calculator'. of course i suggested she target the specific calculators such as 'engineering calculator' and such, but she is slow to the idea. WHY would these people be opposed to targeting an audience when the web is SO big? it baffles me....

[Haystack]

It's certainly not impossible to rank high for single word phrases, but it's often a fruitless effort due to the poor quality of that traffic and the insane amount of effort involved in capturing it.

For example, I think people forget that the web isn't a Best Buy or Target. If someone walked in the front door of one of those two stores and uttered the one word "calculators" there is a good chance they are in the market for a calculator and someone could easily point them to the right department.

However, what if that same person said the same one word in a library? Are they interested in using one? Learning about the history of them? Interested in calculating whether they can afford a bigger house? Who's to say?

Well, in looking at the results for searches on that term it looks like the most common reason people search for that term is to find a calculator they can use online to solve their problem (based on the premise that that found the site useful enough to link to it). This puts someone selling calculators in competition with resource sites like calculator.com, which is apparently a darn good site based on the 35,000 plus times people have linked to it (according to alltheweb.com).

So all that calculator salesperson needs to do is make their site more relevant to the whole web community than a site devoted to calculators (different kind, but same word) with thousands and thousands of inbound links.

[Scottie]

If someone types in 'gifts' and their keyword is 'birthstone gifts' wouldn't they still have a chance of placing (depending on how the user searched of course)?

Exactly!

Try pointing out to them that they are wasting the opportunity to get more traffic if they don't use phrases instead of words. You can optimize a site (in general terms) for gifts while focusing specific pages on "birthday gifts", "handmade gifts". and so on.

Jill's analogy that every page gives you another ticket in the lottery is a good one- why would you buy every ticket with the same numbers? If 16 is your lucky number and you are playing Pick 3, put 16 on every ticket but then pick 2 different numbers on each ticket to broaden your chances of winning! Buying ten tickets with 16, 16, 16 on them just doesn't make any sense.

[Scottie]

Ah- Ed makes a very good point. (As always!)

Do a quick competitive analysis of their single keyword and show then what they are up against! That is usually an eye-opener. Give them an estimate on a 35,000 link link-building campaign in order to compete...

[torka]

Hey, Barry -- now you've got me confused! (And I really don't need any help in that; I'm confused enough most days as it is...)

In this thread, back on Oct. 4 you said:

One point of particular interest is that it now seems that Google is "stemming" to a certain extent. So if you put in the singular of a word, Google will serve up both the singular and plural versions in its SERP's. If you want only the precise singular form then you must put a + in front of the search term.

But up above in the current thread, you said:

For Google, they only serve up webpages that have exactly what you searched for, either singular or plural.

I think the Oct 4 quote may reflect what Google's doing, although I confess my testing of this has been very limited... I searched for "online class" (singular) and discovered that the #4 result has the word "classes" (plural) four times and "class" only one, while the #5 result doesn't have the word "class" at all (but also has "classes" four times). Of course, they could be ranking because everybody else is linking to them with the words "online classes"...

Is there anybody who's done some more scientific / complete research on this? Could make a difference in keyword selection if Google's actually started stemming...

--Torka

[btreloar]

It seems to me that in most cases, using the plural includes the singular. If you do a search for "widget" and a site comes up with the word "widgets" in the Google snippet, you may notice that it appears as widgets, with the search term "widget" highlighted within the plural. (Obviosuly this doesn't work for words like company/companies.)

Therefore, by optimizing for plural phrases, aren't you sort of getting the singular phrase for free?

I do wonder, though, whether you sacrifice rankings that way. It's a little tough to tell, since the competition for "widgets" is usually somewhat different from (and smaller than) the competition for "widget".

Bill