Keyword Plurals – Consider the ‘S’ When Targeting Keywords
If you want to maximize your secondary income you need to write blog posts that are targeted for keywords that can bring you traffic and make money for you.
When you target a keyword to write a blog post about do you consider the ramifications of the plural form of the word or words? If not, you should. There are many reasons why it is important to target both the singular form of your keyword and the plural form, but for me perhaps the biggest reason is that you may be able to take advantage of other marketers who are not considering the plural form of keywords, and you may therefor be able to rank higher for that keyword.
An Example
Here is an example of what I mean. Let’s say that you wanted to optimize a post for your keyword “snowblower review”. As you have probably surmised, there are 4 different combinations of those two words that makeup your keyword phrase (of course there are far more such as “snow blower review” not to mention misspellings, but I am going with 4 for simplicity):
- snowblower review
- snowblowers review
- snowblower reviews
- snowblowers reviews
I’m going to use two different tools to collect some information about these keywords to decide how I am going to optimize my post.
First, I am going to use the Google Keywords Tool to capture estimated CPC (Cost per Click, this basically tells me what people are willing to spend on Ads, not what I would actually earn), and average search volume.
Then I am going to use standard Google search to find the number of exact match pages in the Google index and the number of targeted pages in the Google index. Targeted pages means the number of pages that are optimized for my keyword. I determined this by doing a search on “inurl:”my keywords” intitle:”my keywords” (I’m going to write up a post on this technique at another time – for now checkout PotPieGirl’s post on Keyword Research).
Here are the results of this analysis:
| Keyword | CPC | Search Volume | Exact match Pages | Targeted Pages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| snowblower review | $0.42 | 1,900 | 1,370 | 58 |
| snowblower reviews | $0.55 | 4,400 | 6,230 | 91 |
| snowblowers review | $0.05 | 210 | 724 | 48 |
| snowblowers reviews | $0.05 | 720 | 1,070 | 10 |
(Data current as of writing of this post).
What To Do With This Data
Now looking at this data I can immediately tell that “snowblower reviews” is actually a more popular keyword than the singular version “snowblower review”. CPC is higher, there are many more searches on that keyword, and there are more targeted pages for that keyword. So does that mean we should be targeting “snowblower reviews”?
No! We are only just getting started here.
Now that we see these results we can see that the competition for our original keyword is still pretty high. Would we be better served looking at the others? Certainly the CPC of “snowblowers review” and “snowblowers reviews” are not attractive, but if we are selling our own products or affiliate links then we don’t care about Adsense, do we?
Of the other two keywords I like “snowblowers reviews” a lot more and here is why:
- Search volume is 3x higher
- More direct match pages but percentage wise not much more
- But here’s the key – way fewer targeted pages. Only 10!
In this case even though the CPC is lower and the average monthly search volume is lower, I would be very tempted to target the double plural keyword rather than my original keyword, simple because the real competition for that keyword is so much less.
Why is the competition less? Because those marketers are not considering plurals to the degree that they should. Clearly there are still people searching for that phrase and internet marketers should be taking advantage of that.
Consider the plural form of your keywords and you could be getting the jump on the competition!
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One Comment on Keyword Plurals – Consider the ‘S’ When Targeting Keywords
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How To Optimize Landing Page Keywords | Secondary Income Blog on
Tue, 27th Jan 2009 12:06 pm
[...] second site. So I am also going to add that as a keyword for the first site. Read my post on using keyword plurals to learn more about that [...]
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