Don’t Overlook the Power of Keywords in the Singular Form

June 18th, 2008 by Ann Smarty | 6 Comments

Back in March Hitwise published its UK search report on differences between plural and singular keyword forms echoed by multiple bloggers enthusiastically encouraging webmasters to focus efforts on plural because plural form was proved to send more traffic.

Recent news on Google Trends new makeover prompted me to test the tool again and this brought me back to plural vs singular considerations. Let’s look what Google has to say on [laptop vs laptops] difference discussed in Hitwise report:

[laptop vs laptops]

See? The difference is amazing. According to Google [laptop] is three times as popular as [laptops] throughout the world (in UK the singular version is twice as popular). Hard to believe, isn’t it? So either Google is wrong (which is even harder to believe) or this might mean the following:

Google is considering broad match - thus all the millions of possible phrases containing “laptop” fall under [laptop] search.

This theory is supported by more comparing of the two sources (Hitwise and Google): [free laptop] holds with Hitwise the first place within singular terms and indeed Google agrees that it is much more popular than its plural counterpart:

[free laptop] vs [free laptops]

And if we take Hitwise’s most popular plural term [cheap laptops], we will see that the two sources again come into line:

[cheap laptops] vs [cheap laptop]

Thus though when taken isolated, the keyword in its plural form is more popular, in long tail |laptop| searches are much higher than |laptops|. This probably also accounts for a great number of Noun+Noun constructions where singular usually prevails: e.g. laptop bags, laptop deals, laptop batteries.

This brings us to very important conclusions:

when choosing what to optimize for, look at the keyword in phrase (not isolated one);
thoroughly think over your website structure to “catch” the Longtail with both singular and plural version of the word.

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Comments

6 responses so far ↓

Jason Billingsley on Jun 18, 2008 at 12:28 pm

My original thought was the trend likely follows the type of product some is searching for. People only buy a single laptop (usually), but tend to buy multiple candles. BUT, looking at G Trends - doesn’t seem to be the case.

Video game beats video games, candle beats candles, book beats books.

I suspect you are right with the broad match assumption.
Gautamm Mehra on Jun 19, 2008 at 6:04 am

Pretty amazing right!

Besides the reason of broad matching as mentioned in the article, Google also uses “word stemming” technologies. These means that even though one may be looking for “swimming”, Google also pulls up “swim” as it is the stem word. It does this with various algorithms such as LSI, Porter Stemming etc.
Robert on Jun 19, 2008 at 9:44 am

We had this discussion in the office a while back. I tended to go with the singular when optimizing while others would suggest that when searching for many things people would look for options on more than just a single make or model. I imagine that the singular would still work better as it would double in both cases (not always) due to stemming.

Anyhow, your broad match theory seems to make the most sense to me on this one.
Mark Kaufman on Jul 1, 2008 at 4:23 pm

The About Google Trends page (http://www.google.com/intl/en/trends/about.html#6) indirectly suggests that Google Trends data is for searches that *contain* your term:

To restrict your results to only those searches that *contain* your terms in the specific order you’ve entered them, you can put your terms in quotation marks: “snow boots”.
Ann Smarty on Jul 6, 2008 at 10:53 am

@Mark : tried it, didn’t seem to help? Do you have another experience?
Mark Kaufman on Jul 7, 2008 at 12:58 pm

Ann, I think you may have misunderstood me. I don’t believe there is a way to have Google Trends give data on literal matches to search terms. I was calling out their word choice — “contains”, which would indicate, as you wrote in your post, that Google Trends gives data on broad matches.