Do hyphenated searches impact SEO?
-
Something I recently considered was whether a hyphen in a search term would effect the results that come up. For example, Is there a difference between using 'i-phone' and 'i phone' as anchor text? Some of my search results seem similar but do show some slight differences.
Can anyone shed light on the matter?
-
Thanks, Rob.
I did notice the search volumes are the same. And it is true that the searches are very close. With Semantic update this may become even closer as they are the same in reality.
It crossed my mind though that there may be a benefit of choosing 'i phone' over 'i-phone' as people are less likely to type in a hyphen rather than not, especially on mobile. Every little helps.
-
Technically, they are treated as separate terms, but because they are likely to be closely semantically linked you won't see any drastic variations.
If you go into the Keyword Planner tool, you can see that for that iphone example you get different search volumes for "iphone" and "i-phone". Therefore Google does recognise them as separate search terms.
However, in 95% of cases I'd say, a hyphenated version of a keyword or keywords is more often than not showing the same search intent from a user. Therefore, Google will do its best to serve up similar search engine results. With the algorithm being as sophisticated as it is, it can make this connection in most instances.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Recommendations on SEO Tools, Strategies and References
Hello all, I have been doing SEO/SEM work on some sites I own for a few years but now I am in a position where I need to handle these tasks for a significant numbers of clients on a freelance basis. Obviously, this requires much more work and organization as well as some additional tools to help. I was wondering if the experts on here could help me with the following: Does anyone know of any online step-by-step guides or checklists that highlight a comprehensive SEO and digital marketing strategy? This could be helpful while trying to juggle multiple projects at once and provide a blueprint that I can follow and alter as I go. What free project management tools do you recommend? I was thinking of using Wunderlist, Trello or Evernote to keep track of projects, but there may be other suggestions I am not aware of. I have it in my budget to spend about $200/month worth of paid tools. Which tools are best for keyword research, backlink analysis, search rankings etc.? I am currently testing out Moz and SEM Rush, but would like a wide variety of information that helps me efficiently execute a plan but without too much white noise. What are the best paid (or free) tools to accomplish this? What are the best references for Q&As and reference materials on strategies, etc. for when I need to deep dive and do some learning on the fly? Besides this website of course. Thanks for any help!!
Link Building | | ccdispoto2 -
How to create good SEO content for an essentially thin ecommerce site?
I have a retail website that in the past has been hit by a manual action for crappy backlinks (these were all done by a previous agency and up until the penalty providing very good results). We have since removed all of the rubbish backlinks and have come out of manual penalty and are looking in to our long term strategy in terms of content and link building. We have a blog within our site that does well with traffic and with an OK conversion to the products that feature within the posts, we are also putting together a strategy in terms of long term content plans and while this is all very good for the blog, the ecommerce part of the domain continues to suffer. I know that part of this is because we did remove all of these links that were giving it juice, but where do you start with SEO when what you are dealing with is essentially thin content? With around 7000 products, every page has unique descriptions and titles that have been updated to remove keyword stuffing and over optimisation that has occured in the past. We don't want to go down the route of getting an agency that is going to put us back in Googles bad books, but how do you go about getting a retail page juice without firing backlinks at it? Not looking for the holy grail here but just looking for some advice, I want a clear idea of a direction to go in before recruiting an agency to do this.
Link Building | | timsilver0 -
Where to start Energy and investment versus more impact
I would like someone to help me decide where should I take resources to do my SEO and where should I start with? I include 2 graphs to depict my current position versus competitors. Its been now 2 years I market my site and I feel I am so far away from my competitor. I wonder what they do to get so much links. I just don't know where to head. I hired some Indian people who seem like they were very good technically but it was only words.. I pay them for a couple of month to find out what they were doing was not leaded towards quality and they were not doing half of what they promised. I am a small business and I don't have a lot of budget to start but it will grow as SEO proved to be good. I have 15 years in this business so I'm looking for long terms relationship and or very good advices. ILfWjjB.png vmGGZXd.png
Link Building | | groupemedia0 -
Customizing Search Engine Searches
In the article, "Long List of Link Searches", Rand recommends: "At Google and others, it often helps to show 100 results per page and have the maximum "grouping" of results from the same site. That way, you can find all of the most relevant pages on a particular domain with ease." Can someone please share with me just how to customize the various search engine views this way?
Link Building | | AhmadS0 -
Could I be the victim of negative SEO?
While I was searching for bad links to one of my website, I realized that there were lots of backlinks from trackbacks on various blogs. Most of these trackback links are definitely spammy as they are not relevant with the blog topics and they use exact anchor text. The thing is that I am 300% sure that it has nothing to do with any SEO campaign services I've bought in the past. They link back to pages I've never optimized at all. So could I be the victim of a negative SEO campaign? What do you think?
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
Would you keep Paid Directory Submissions a part of your SEO Strategy?
We've been debating this. We've had some budget allocated to quality paid directory listings. We read that SEOMOZ analyzed some 2685 directories, 20% of which were banned from Google. So our question is, should we keep paid directory submissions with keyword rich anchor texts as a part of your SEO strategy or should we drop it. Thanks!
Link Building | | globaleyeglasses0 -
Are backlinks from sites like diigo useful for SEO?
I read an SEO article that recommended getting backlinks from social bookmarking sites like diggo.com. Does anyone have any thoughts on the usefulness of these types of links?
Link Building | | casper4340 -
What are the best tactics for SEO on a brand new site?
What is on everyones to do list when starting SEO work on a brand new site that has had no SEO work done in the past?
Link Building | | MediaBazooka0
