When the Plural has more traffic, but the singular makes much more sense. What to do?
-
Hey everyone! This is actually the first time I ever posted a question here on MOZ! Guess I was (still am) embarrassed by being an SEO Noob!
That being said, I really have to get some input on this matter and i was wondering if you guys might be able to help.
I'm optimizing a page for a wedding venue in Portugal. Currently, according to google trends the Plural - Venues for weddings, scores considerably better than the Singular, Venue for weddings(this was researched in Portuguese written terms of course). Despite this, i'm leaning towards an optimization for the Singular term, because the plural seems to un-natural to fit in the content, or title. I managed to fit the Plural in the description but i've read that it hasn't influenced rank directly for a while.
Currently my title tag reads: Venue for Weddings | Name of the Venue. I really can't find anyway that it makes sense to me in the Plural... and i feel like if i was a user, i would rather click on the singular term cause it just makes a lot more sense. But my opinion is most probably biased by the fact that i understand that using the plural term will be solemnly an SEO effort to rank higher for a term that has more average searches per month.
My question is: In the current state of search algorithms, will an optimization for the singular term, still get me some rank on the plural key phrase?
Let me know what you think about this please, and thank you in advance for your time.
Most Respectfully,
Martim Coutinho dos Santos
-
Consider creating a page on your site for both terms. Weddings are a big deal for people and ultimately, they are going to book a venue that they love and relate to. If you have a great venue, you shouldn't be afraid to list a few other venues (perhaps not your primary competitors) that are good alternatives. Perhaps you could even make a referral arrangement with them and earn some income from people who book their venues from your page.
- Your home page could target the singular, Wedding Venue term - and of course highlight your venue.
- An additional page would be created to highlight the plural, Venues for Weddings, and the content would focus on the Top Venues in your city.
It's a great chance for you to highlight what is special about your venue and deliver value to the searchers of either term.
-
I have stopped thinking about singular and plural. Stopped a couple years ago.
Now I just word my title tags like the average person talks, trying to say something that makes 'em click... and then deliver the best content possible when they land.
Title tags are still really important but google, I believe, will favor natural language and good content way over keyword stuffin' and optimizin'.
-
Ha, yeah. This job would be so easy if only clients weren't a factor. The ones that listen are always the ones that have more success.
Good luck convincing your client. Keep your cool, it can be frustrating when clients force you to let them shoot themselves in the foot. This is because once their foot is bleeding, they're going to blame you for the pain.
-
Thanks for the quick answer!
I really get what you're saying and share your opinion! I think the user's POV is always the best when it comes to this kind of decisions. Unfortunately, the client doesn't think the same cause someone told him that "Venues" is "da bomb" because it has the most searches per month.. And here in Portugal people still think that SEO is just supposed to get you on the first page, and it stops there. Clients don't want to know about traffic conversion, they just care if they rank higher than their "neighbor".. My guess would be that this is a common issue with clients in this industry, but again, I'm still an SEO Noob
Hopefully and with some patience and educating i can make him see what he really needs to be concerned about!
Once again, many thanks for taking the time to answer!
Respectfully,
Martim Santos
-
Imagine you are a user. If you're searching the singular, you're probably looking for a SERP with websites of single venue locations to browse through. If you were searching the plural, you're probably looking for websites that aggregate, list, rank or otherwise provide you with a predetermined group of venues. So, if you are a single venue trying to rank for "venues" you're always going to struggle against those sites that naturally use the plural.
With that said, yes, optimizing for a singular will usually give you some juice for the plural as well, but not as much. If you're starting from scratch, I would recommend going for the lower competition, more relevant key term first.
And remember, more traffic doesn't always mean more results. Targeting keywords without the proper searcher intent is going to get you traffic that doesn't convert.
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
-
Image Search / sudden drop in traffic
One of our sites in Germany had a very sudden drop in traffic (starting Oct. 7th). The site gets most of it's organic traffic from Image Search. Checking in Search Console revealed that search volume for keywords increased in that period our average position is stable our click rate dropped dramatically (we double checked - searching the keyword in "anonymous mode" still showed our results for main keywords in top image positions (first 2 rows)). As an example (see attached screencopy) - keyword had clickrate of 1% (average) - dan dropped to 0.06% while the position remained stable. Germany is still using the "old" version of image search (unlike the rest of the world) - which gives the site preview rather than just the image slider when you click on a result in image search. Our first thought that this was changed - but it seems that it didn't change. Ideas what might cause this dramatic drop in click%? There have been no major technical modifications on the site for the last 2 months. thanks, Dirk GjlV8CW.jpg
Technical SEO | | DirkC0 -
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect?
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect? If this scenario requires a 301 redirect no matter what, I might as well update the URL to be a little more keyword rich for the page while I'm at it. However, since these pages are ranking well I'd rather not lose any authority in the process and keep the URL just stripped of the ".html" (if that's possible). Thanks for you help! [edited for formatting]
Technical SEO | | Booj0 -
Are backlinks the reason for my site's much lower SERP ranking, despite similar content?
Hi all, I'm trying to determine why my site (surfaceoptics.com) ranks so much lower than my competitor's sites. I do not believe the site / page content explains this differential in ranking, and I've done on-site / on-page SEO work without much or any improvement. In fact I believe my site is very similar in quality to competitor sites that rank much higher for my target keyword of: hyperspectral imaging. This leads me to believe there is a technical problem with the site that I'm not seeing, or that the answer lies in our backlink profile. The problem is that I've compared our site with 4 of our competitors in the Open Site Explorer and I'm not seeing a strong trend when it comes to backlinks either. Some competitors have more links / better backlink profiles but then other sites have no external links to their pages and lower PA and DA and still outrank us by 30+ positions. How should I go about determining if the problem is backlinks or some technical issue with the site?
Technical SEO | | erin_soc0 -
I've consolidated other domains to a single one with 301 redirects, yet the new domain authority in MOZ is much less that the redirected ones. Is that right?
I'm trying to increase the domain authority of my main site, so decided to consolidate other sites. One of the other sites has a much higher domain authority, but I don't know why after a 301 redirect, the new site's domain authority hasn't changed on over a month. Does MOZ take account of thes types of things?
Technical SEO | | bytecgroup2 -
PhantomJS to Make AJAX Pages Crawlable
Anyone have any experience using PhantomJS to return HTML snapshots of AJAX rendered pages? More specifically, does anyone know if Google takes issue with this technique in any way? Interested in learning about this technique? Using PhantomJS to allow Googlebot to crawl your AJAX pages.
Technical SEO | | RyanOD0 -
Why has my keyword dropped and risen so much in only 7 days?
Sorry if this question is really obvious (or unanswerable) but my client asked me for an explanation and as a relative SEO 'noob' I couldn't really answer them. The client's site http://www.solentlep.org.uk/ dropped 29 places for the keyword LEP last week (all the other keywords had small rises and falls) and then this week has jumped back up the same 29 places. I made no changes to the site in the 7 period (as I hadn't worked out what to change) and although everything is fine now I'd still like to let the client know what caused the blip, or is it one of those things that 'nobody knows'.
Technical SEO | | bendyman0 -
How can i increase my website traffic
Hello, my boss has decide a build website we have more than 12500 products in ourwebsite its mtscellular.com, im new as seo but im confused and need help i want to know how somebody help me to increase my website traffic
Technical SEO | | jimmylora0 -
Mobile site - allow robot traffic
Hi, If a user comes to our site from a mobile device, we redirect to our mobile site. That is www.mysite/mypage redirects to m.mysite/mypage. Right now we are blocking robots from crawling our m. site. Previously there were concerns the m. site could rank for normal browser searches. To make sure this isn't a problem we are planning on rel canonical our m. site pages and reference the www pages (mobile is just a different version of our www site). From my understanding having a mobile version of a page is a ranking factor for mobile searches so allowing robots is a good thing. Before doing so, I wanted to see if anyone had any other suggestions/feedback (looking for potential pitfalls, issues etc)
Technical SEO | | NicB10