Does it makes any difference if i use 's' at the end of keyword.

[viniyog]

In terms of ranking and other stuff, how does adding 's' at the end of a keyword works ?

For example - 'Custom Cases' in place of 'Custom Case'

I am getting different results as well for both. Please advice....

[SeattleOrganicSEO]

I usually go for the plural if I can because it includes the possibility of the singular being hit.   However, there are some terms that the plural and the singular versions have two distinct linguistic intent. Google will eventually get smart about this and has already in some cases, but for products like you're describing above, I usually try to do the plural version if at all possible.

[viniyog]

Thanks Alan. I am going to use BOTH for now and will share results here as well after few month !

Best

Ankit

[AlanMosley]

I find you will rank for both anyhow, if you look at keywords in google, you will see a keyword like company (2 versions), meaning you have company and comanies on your site.

I would try to put both in like rob said, it looksa more natural, search engines analyze the page for words that should support your keywords to see if your content is natural

[RobertFisher]

If you do not want to have two pages, one singular and one plural, I would set up my SEO for the one with the most queries if I thought I could handle the competition and rank for the term. If I felt I would have more chance of ranking and converting with the lesser queries, I might set it up for that.

One way I look at this is to do broad and exact match to see what the difference is on each term. As an exact match (see Andrew's response) Custom cases gets more than double the queries, but the broad match custom case wins 165K to 135K. My guess is that I would go with custom cases and I believe I would be served up more times in broad match. Just IMO.

With either case, I would also insure there was the opportunity to rank for both by including say an H2 on the secondary, etc. (also use that keyword within context in the page).

You, obviously, could set up two pages if you felt one would not dilute the other. I always worry about dilution on plurals though.

Best

[viniyog]

Thanks Andrew !

Now the question which arise here is, which of the 2 is better for SEO purpose and other metrics, adding 's' or just simple...

Cheers !

Ankit

[AndrewWheeler58]

HI Ankit,

Adding a S as you mentioned will produce different results and thus different competition for your SEO campaign. So, if you want to rank higher for 'custom case' create content about a 'custom case' and build links with that anchor text.

In your example, 'custom case' based on the Google Keyword Tool gets 720 searches, whereas 'custom cases' gets 1600.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew